Fighting Words : : Working-Class Formation, Collective Action, and Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century England / / Marc W. Steinberg.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Steinberg, Marc W.,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©1999
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (312 p.) :; 7 tables

A key component of social life, discourse mediates the processes of class formation and social conflict. Drawing on dialogic theory and building on the work of E. P. Thompson, Marc W. Steinberg argues for the importance of incorporating discursive analysis into the historical reconstruction of class experience. Amending models of collective action, he offers new insights on how discourse shapes the dynamics of popular protest. To support his thesis, he presents studies of two English trade groups in the 1820s: cotton spinners from Lancashire factory towns and London silk weavers.For each case, Steinberg closely examines the labor process, industrial organization, social life, community politics, discursive struggles, and collective actions. By describing how workers shared experiences of exploitation and oppression in their daily lives, he shows how discourses of contention were products of struggle and how they framed possibilities for collective action. Embracing work in literary theory, sociocultural psychology, and cultural studies, Fighting Words claims a middle ground between postmodern and materialist analyses.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Tables -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- PRELIMINARIES -- Introduction: Theoretical and Historiographical Considerations -- 1. Patterns of English Labor Contention in the Early Nineteenth Century -- 2. A Tale of Two Areas -- SPITALFIELDS -- 3. The Silk Trade: Memory, Market, and Means of Production -- 4. Local Political Culture: From Reciprocity to Hegemony -- 5. The Repeal of the Spitalfields Acts -- 6. Post-Repeal Collective Actions: Battling the Hydra of Degradation -- ASHTON-STALYBRIDGE -- 7. King Cotton: Markets, Mills, and Mechanics -- 8. Class Structure, Class Cultures, and Social Lives -- 9. Local Political Culture: The Stranglehold of Wealth -- 10. The Vitriol of Conflict -- 11. Class War: The Spinners' Strikes of 1830 —1831 -- 12. Class Formation, Collective Action, and the Role of Discourse -- Appendix 1. Spitalfields weavers' collective actions, c. 1825-1831 -- Appendix 2. Ashton and Stalybridge spinners' collective actions, April 1830–January 1831 -- References -- Index