This four-person special session will explore representations of social class in British fiction through the lens of spatial theory. In doing so, the panel will delineate aesthetic strategies of representation, tracing the development of literary forms while considering how authors mobilized spatial metaphors to better express contingent social and economic realities. Nigel Thrift and Peter Williams have noted how “soft” data can help augment more traditional modes of class inquiry, with narratives acting as a way to corroborate and complicate empirical research. As such, the panel responds to Thrift and Williams’s claim that cultural production offers a fruitful access point by which to comprehend the way space and social class interact. Given the literary imagination’s capacity to uncover certain truths about the world otherwise unrecognized, the papers on this panel all stress the importance of such analytical methods by highlighting not just how British class-conscious writing has deployed spatial motifs over time, but how authors have engaged spatial concepts in a manner that presupposes and anticipates analysis associated with the spatial turn. Each panelist will speak on this topic for 12-15 minutes to allow for at least 15 minutes of discussion.

First, Matthew Reznicek will discuss the way early-nineteenth-century novels by writers like Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott reflect the intersections of urban planning and public health. Reznicek’s paper, “Fevered Anxieties,” considers how the lower orders of society were marked as diseased and the way such demarcations produced spatial borders, boundaries, and divisions. Reznicek argues that the fiction of the era shed light on biopolitical imperatives, in which relative health and wellness were used to justify social stratification. Second, Elizabeth Floyd will consider a post-WWII emphasis on social mobility, focusing on the way government propaganda promoted urban planning and middle-class life as a viable path for working-class people. Floyd’s presentation, “Remembering the Future,” contrasts the 1945 film Proud City: A Plan for London with Graham Greene’s 1951 novel, The End of the Affair, to demonstrate how architecture and urbanism interact with articulations of classed subjectivity. Greene’s novel, Floyd argues, makes clear inherent tensions between post-WWII redevelopment plans and the anxieties of a middle class whose primacy over the working classes contours their identity. Third, Ben Clarke will draw on pioneering texts in the field of cultural studies to examine John Braine’s use of spatial representation. Titled “Low Tastes,” Clarke’s presentation suggests that Braine aligns with contemporary figures such as Richard Hoggart in his desire to understand the way meaning is generated and contested in everyday spaces and practices. Clarke shows how the significance of the ordinary is founded on working-class forms of thought characterized, as Hoggart argues, by an emphasis on “the personal, the concrete, the local.” Fourth, my paper, titled “Addressing Stigma,” will look at the shift from a period of relative affluence and access to disposable income of the post-WWII years to the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which Thatcher’s conservative policies decimated working-class communities by closing mines and factories while moving work overseas. Turning to Pat Barker’s 1982 novel Union Street, I consider the text’s implicit question: What happens to classed subjectivities in spaces where work no longer exists?

In light of the fact that social class is a “felt” phenomenon, it can be said that the most tangible notions of class are experienced materially. And if an argument can be made against methods of analysis that prioritize empirical or “hard” data, it is that such methods tend to minimize lived experience in ways that render class conditions largely hypothetical. Turning to literature as a way to access “data” about lived experience highlights the importance of elevating class analysis beyond mere abstraction while also maintaining objectivity through sanctioned forms of storytelling. Furthermore, this panel parallels the 2023 Presidential Theme of “Working Conditions” by showing how literary representations of space associated with sites of labor provide insight into social formations. In addition, this panel will coincide with the release of a new scholarly volume, the origins of which can be traced to the 2018 MLA conference in New York City.