1 - Bringing together the fields of sociology and literature: Towards an integration of Modernist industrial novels into industrial sociology

Summary

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the main research question dealt with in this study: do modernist 20th-century industrial novels have a surplus value for industrial sociology? There are several reasons for affirming this question. During recent decades industrial sociology has lost momentum in academic study, due for example to the increased significance of organizational sociology and the popularity of human resource management. A revaluation of the historical dimension in industrial sociology could restore this, as well as the application of relevant complementary sources such as realist industrial novels. This book focuses on the possible contribution of 20th-century modernist industrial novels written in the USA, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe in successive time periods in this so-called ‘machine age’.

Keywords: 20th-century industrial novels, industrial sociology, alternative social research sources, history of sociology, interdisciplinary international comparative approach.

Introduction

Modernist 20th-century (documentary) industrial novels, partially or completely based on empirical facts and statistical data, constitute a typical 20th-century phenomenon. Before that time, starting with the first industrial revolution, a substantial number of industrial novels had already been written in various countries. But with some exceptions, such as Friedrich Engels's non-fictional reportage The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels, 1845/1993) and Emile Zola's mineworker novel Germinal (Zola, 1885/1991), these were not intentionally based on empirical facts, but were fiction. One of the most renowned examples of a narrative industrial novel is Charles Dickens's Hard Times (Dickens, 1854/1993). In this novel Dickens questioned working conditions and labour relations in his fictional ‘Coketown’ (Manchester). Dickens was not unique. In the middle of the 19th century there were several other renowned British and American authors who published remarkable industrial novels. British literary critic and art historian Raymond Williams summarized a number of these novels in his seminal book Culture and Society 1780–1950 (Williams, 1958/1963). Williams considered mid-19th-century British authors of industrial novels as expressions of ‘industrialism’ – a new collective system composed of manufacturing and productive institutions and their general activities. In his view industrial novels such as Looking Backward (Bellamy, 1888), Mary Barton (Gaskell, 1854/2008), North and South (Gaskell, 1854–1855/1996), Hard Times (Dickens, 1854/1993), Sybil (Disraeli, 1845), Anton Locke (Kingsley, 1892/2016), and Felix Holt (George Eliot, 1866) ‘provide vivid descriptions of life in an unsettled industrial society, but also illustrate certain common assumptions within which direct response was undertaken’ (Williams, 1958/1963, pp. 13, 99).