Victorian Labour History

Autorentext

John Host is Associate Lecturer in History and Sociology at the Centre for Aboriginal Programmes, The University of Western Australia.

Klappentext

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Zusammenfassung
First Published in 2004. In Victorian Labour History: Experience, Identity and the Politics of Representation, John Host addresses liberal, Marxist and postmodernist historiography on Victorian working people to question the special status of historical knowledge. The central focus of this study is a debate about mid-Victorian social stability, a condition conventionally equated with popular acceptance of the social order. Host does not join the debate but takes it as his object of analysis, deconstructing the notion of stability and the analyses that purport to explain it. In particular, he takes issue with historical evidence, noting the different possibilities for meaning that it allows and the speculative character of the narratives to which it is adduced. Host examines an extensive range of archival material to illustrate the ambiguity of the historical field, the rhetorical strategies through which the illusion of its unity is created, and the ultimately fictive quality of historical narrative. He then explores the political contingency of the works he addresses and the political consequences of representing them as true.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements, Introduction, 1. Narratives of the past or histories of the present?, 2. Social identity and the representation of experience, 3. Who are `the people in mid-Victorian labour history?, 4. Narrative history and the politics of exclusion, Afterword, Appendix: Evidence of witnesses in the cases of William Pearce and James Bristol, Notes, Bibliography, Index