Menke, Richard. "Cultural Capital and the Scene of
Rioting: Male Working-Class Authorship in Alton Locke," Victorian
Literature and Culture Vol. 28, No. 1 (2000): 87-108.
Menke considers “the protean Locke and the story Kingsley tells about
him not as figures of pure writing but as representations of the relationship
between the ‘condition of England problem’ and the sphere of cultural production.
– specifically, between the social problem of class oppression and what
John Guillory, after the French sociologist of culture Pierre Bourdieu,
has taught us to call ‘cultural capital’”. Menke argues that Alton
Locke is concerned with a very practical feature of cultural capital:
“linguistic access to the correct forms of literary language, institutional
access to publication or patronage, material access to the time
and tools necessary for writing literature, socio-literary access
to the appropriate genres and traditions.” Menke also contends that
“the novel’s treatment of Chartist politics impinges upon its construction
of male, working-class authorship as a resolvable analogue and displacement
of the problems raised by radical politics” (88).
Alton
Locke;
Chartism;
Cooper,
Thomas. |
