Invisible ink

Abstract

The article examines a range of working-class writing from the 1980s and early 1990s in the context of the then current and continuing debates in Britain about the relevance of class in relation to identity and/or experience. The work explores some of the reasons for the devaluation of class and class analyses in recent times, and sets out to question this development by reviewing working-class writing from the period which articulates the continuing imperatives of class. The writing considered is significant in the way it draws together class, gender and race, and the article then insists on the necessary complexity of our understanding of class as lived experience if it is to remain relevant (as it must) to cultural studies.