Working-class writing resists orderly classification due to its contextual deference, yet tropes and motifs reoccur with enough regularity to suggest formal continuity. Perhaps the most persistent motif in working-class writing is nostalgia, its presence frequently dismissed as sentimental or naive. However, nostalgic motifs are multivalent, often exceeding the aesthetic in order to contest such sentimentality. For example, Nick Hubble has recently argued that strategic portrayals of the past permit new class articulations in the present, and Sherry Lee Linkon has shown how recollection stabilizes present-day identities threatened by neoliberal policies of deindustrialization. This special session builds on such claims by exploring nostalgia’s ramifications as a central motif of class-conscious writing. If nostalgia is a form of reactivated desire, then how does it influence our ability to cope with class in the present, our desire to manipulate cultural timelines, or our drive to transcend structures of the past in lieu of alternate modalities of being? Comprised of four concise presentations followed by 15 minutes of discussion, this panel will address such questions while insisting that nostalgia, as a protracted motif, performs a far more sophisticated role in contouring working-class writing than is often surmised.

My own presentation sets the stage, highlighting the critical capacity of nostalgia in working-class representation while delineating some of the panel’s concerns. The paper, “Memory of Place: Locale and Nostalgia in Pat Barker’s Union Street,” looks specifically at the way social realism commonly associated with class-conscious writing invokes the past as an ideal of community spirit while critiquing retrogressive traditions. John Kirk, discussing Barker’s 1986 novel The Century’s Daughter, claimed that her work fails because it indulges in sentimentality. Catherine Bernard, however, counters Kirk’s claim, arguing that Barker’s fiction invokes nostalgia to challenge culturally-constructed manifestations of collective memory. Union Street centers on the lives of working-class women, specifically their response to shifts in social conditions following the deindustrialization of the British Northeast. In this case, the street operates as a tool of nostalgia — a space that’s culturally maligned as “rough” yet is celebrated by the community as a unifier of collective ideals. Barker’s novel confronts working-class nostalgia through a condemnation of stasis, both in terms of social limits and what Raymond Williams refers to as “knowable communities.” As such, this presentation illuminates how nostalgia, as a trope of working-class writing, is more complex than it seems.

Second, Michael Allen will further challenge dismissive assumptions about nostalgia in his paper “Geoffrey Hill’s English Works and Workers,” arguing that Hill’s poetry offers a searching investigation of the relationship between aesthetic form and labor value, nostalgia, and power. Allen shows how 1971’s Mercian Hymns’ otherwise incongruous combination of working-class pride and regal subject-matter derives from Hill’s imaginative archeology of the English working class. The paper underscores the emotional center of the sequence as an outraged elegy for cottage laborers, spoken by Hill in “memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent” making nails. This familial elegy for a maker is framed by Hill’s meditation on Offa, an Anglo-Saxon ruler known for his assertion of kingship through coinage, who managed to impress his “legend” on history. Hill’s archeological imagination, Allen posits, risks what he calls the “considerable impropriety” of extending the poetic history of Opus Anglicanum, “English work,” an aristocratic art of fine medieval needlework, to include “the utilitarian metal-work” of almost vanished proto-proletarians like his grandmother. The presentation concludes by showing how’s Hill’s commitment to a critique of English political-economy in the almost irrecoverable subjectivities of working-class people lets him identify and avoid what he called the “slime track” of “self-pity and nostalgia.”

Third, Bill Fogarty’s “‘You Know All Them Things’: Nostalgia, Sentiment, and Speech in Working-Class Poetry” complements Allen’s emphasis on craft and regionalism, arguing that local speech in nostalgic poems about working-class life act as a resource to prevent such poems from becoming sentimental. For example, Seamus Heaney often punctuates his farm-life family memorials with examinations of local language, demonstrating how code switching occurs across regional dialects that critique nostalgic stasis. Similarly, Tony Harrison’s The School of Eloquence portrays a working-class household that sidestep nostalgic romanticism through an unsettling dissonance. The presentation explains how Harrison’s poems emphasize the working-class speech patterns of his youth, creating a sonic corollary for family fractures caused by class distinctions and intra-class division. Last, Fogarty shows how Lucille Clifton’s work recovers a crucial voice of American existence that social hierarchies have attempted to erase, specifically in the way that characters’ domestic “handiwork” comes to represent the work of unheard nonwhite female poets. As such, Fogerty’s presentation centers on the productive function of nostalgia in working-class portrayal through labor practices, joining the panel’s other presenters in highlighting this crucial complexity and helping elucidate the genre of working-class writing.

Last, building on Fogarty’s discussion of regionalism, Chloe Ashbridge’s “‘We’ve Had Enough’: Class, Regionality, and Nostalgia in the Brexit Novel,” considers the interplay between nostalgia-infused cultural production and society itself. Turning to Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (2017), a novel specifically commissioned as a fictional response to the UK’s Brexit vote, Ashbridge examines how the text engages nostalgia through its emphasis on the structural geographic and political peripherality of the working classes’ experience of the Brexit referendum. The paper posits that a major concern of Cartwright’s text is the role of strong regional identity and the politicization of nostalgia as a rejection of the British state’s imperative to achieve what Theresa May called a “truly global Britain.” Consequently, Ashbridge suggests that nostalgia as a literary motif is associated with regional parochiality that forecloses the prospect of political action and change. Asking what role, if any, does the working-class regional novel have to play in a post-Brexit-vote context, Ashbridge situates Cartwright’s writing in relation to the emergent literary genre of what Kristian Shaw has termed “BrexLit” as well as within the lineage of British social realism where nostalgia thrives. The presentation brings the panel full circle by emphasizing not just nostalgia’s function in delineating working-class writing, but working-class writing’s value in culture itself.