4.6.4.17 Proletarian.

4. 6. 4. 17 Proletarian.

The novel that, like Dickens' Hard Times (1854), presents the lives of workingmen or other members of the lower orders is not necessarily an example of proletarian fiction. The category properly springs out of direct experience of proletarian life and is not available to writers whose background is bourgeois or aristocratic. Consequently, William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), or Robert Bage's Hermsprong (1796), although, like Hard Times sympathetic to the lot of the oppressed worker, is more concerned with the imposition of reform from above than with revolution from within, and the proletarian novel is essentially an intended device of revolution. The Russian Maksim Gorky, with works like Foma Gordeyev (1900) and Mother (1907), as well as numerous short stories portraying the bitterness of poverty and unemployment (in fact, the pseudonym Gorky means " Bitter" ), may be taken as an exemplary proletarian writer. The United States has produced a rich crop of working-class fiction. Such Socialist writers as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, and Edward Dahlberg, however, did not witness the triumph of the workers' revolution in their own country, as Gorky did in his, and it is the fate of the American proletarian novelist, through literary success, either to join the class he once dreamed of overthrowing or to become anarchic and frustrated. In the Soviet Union the proletarian novel was doomed to disappear in the form that Gorky knew, for it is the essence of the revolutionary novel to possess vitality and validity only when written under capitalist " tyranny. " (see also American literature)

England has produced its share of working-class novelists exuding bitterness, such as Alan Sillitoe, with his Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), but conditions apt for revolution have not existed in Britain for more than a century. British novelists who emerged after World War II, such as John Braine (Room at the Top), Keith Waterhouse (There Is a Happy Land), Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim), and Stan Barstow (A Kind of Loving), provided a solution to working-class frustration in a fluid system of class promotion: revolution is an inadmissible dream. Generally speaking, in the novel, which is preoccupied with individuals rather than with groups, it is difficult to make the generalized political statements that are meat and drink to the revolutionary propagandist.

The 'Graveyard School'refers to a genre evolving in the domain of 18th century English poetry. Perhaps the earliest example would be Thomas Parnell's 'A Night-Piece on Death'(1721). The so-called school of poetry dealing with death, bereavement, the grave, the physical manifestations of morbidity etc was chiefly modelled on Robert Blair's long popular poem, 'The Grave'(1743). Edward Young's blank-verse poem, 'Night Thoughts'(1742-45) was a more celebrated example. Thomas Gray's famous work, 'An Elegy Written on a Country Church-Yard' reflected the more meditative aspect of this pre-Romantic school.

Elegy

a sad poem or song: a poem or song that expresses sorrow for someone who is dead