Conference Presentations by Gordon J Tait
Kings College’s conference ‘Fin-de-Siècle Echoes: Strange Friendships, Unseen Rivalries, and Lost Paths of Literary Influence, 1880-1910’., 2015
In his memoir, Everyman Remembers (1931), the co-founder of the Rhymers’ Club Ernest Rhys (1859-1... more In his memoir, Everyman Remembers (1931), the co-founder of the Rhymers’ Club Ernest Rhys (1859-1946) wrote of the working-class poet Joseph Skipsey (1832-1903) that “by his slow mouldering muse, his balladry and his uncouth northern speech he got hold of other poets’ imaginations and became a legend”. While it is known Skipsey got hold of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s imagination little is known about the ‘pitman poet’ outside of his relationship with the Pre-Raphaelite circle of Rossetti and Burne-Jones. The few references to Skipsey in Ernest Rhys’ memoirs, however, are the beginning of a trail that reveals both unexpected friendships and, most importantly, a literary influence that has been lost to history.
This paper examines letters to and from Joseph Skipsey which show how his uncouth northern speech brought friendship with and influence over a generation of poets that included such prominent members of the Rhymers’ Club as Rhys, Ernest Radford, Arthur Symons, and W. B. Yeats. In doing so it will reveal a wider network of contacts that stretched from the fin-de-siècle centre to the periphery of the Great Northern Coalfield, and back again, that will broaden the understanding of the possibilities of a Victorian working-class poet as well as a hitherto unseen link between a writer known for his connection to the Pre-Raphaelites and a group of poets deeply influenced by the works of Rossetti in particular.
University of Hull, annual FACE Postgraduate Conference: ‘Identity and Hybridity’., 2017
After meeting Joseph Skipsey (1832-1903) in June 1880, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) wrote, in... more After meeting Joseph Skipsey (1832-1903) in June 1880, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) wrote, in a letter to his friend Hall Caine (1853-1931), describing the poet and “working miner [Skipsey, as…] a stalwart son of toil and every bit a gentleman. In cast of face he recalls Tennyson […] though more bronzed & brawned. He is as sweet and gentle as a woman in manner”. In this generous description of Skipsey, the ‘pitman poet’, Rossetti juxtaposes and blurs three different forms of cultural identity: class, work, and gender. In this, Rossetti destabilises the hyper-masculine identity of “the terrible and savage pitman”, instead creating for Skipsey an identity that runs counter to the popular perception of the coal miner.
The meeting between Skipsey and Rossetti brought together very different spheres of existence, the liminal and the central, the working-class and the avant-garde, and while this intersection has been noted no actual examination of their relationship has taken place. Drawing on studies of the androgyne in nineteenth-century culture, this paper investigates Skipsey’s engagements with Rossetti and suggest that, following their meeting, Rossetti created a hybrid identity for Skipsey that placed the ‘pitman poet’ beyond the identity defining boundaries of class, work, and gender.
BAVS Annual Conference 2017: ‘Victorians Unbound: Connections and Intersections’, 2017
In her poem ‘Cartographies of Silence’, Adrienne Rich warns that silence should not be taken as a... more In her poem ‘Cartographies of Silence’, Adrienne Rich warns that silence should not be taken as an indication “of absence”. Instead, it implies the existence of “a plan rigorously executed” acting to supress the liminal and the powerless. This ‘plan’ becomes a conspiracy of silence that exists in the unquestioned orthodoxies surrounding those in possession of significant volumes of, what Pierre Bourdieu termed, cultural and social capital. The silence is only broken when those at society’s fringes engage with the culturally powerful; at this point of intersection, ‘lost’ voices become heard and legacies are created.
Despite being doubly disadvantaged by his peripheral location and social class, the Northumbrian working-class poet Joseph Skipsey was more fortunate than most. Becoming friendly with the lawyer, Quaker, and Freemason Robert Spence Watson, Skipsey’s legacy was secured in a biography written by Spence Watson who was not satisfied for his friend “to become a mere memory”. In this, however, Spence Watson’s voice, endorsed by his cultural and social capital, becomes an unquestioned orthodoxy in itself; the biography becomes a site of social control where power structures exist in perpetuity.
However, a recently discovered letter from W. B. Yeats to Joseph Skipsey, and its absence from the biography, begins to destabilise this orthodoxy. Focussing in particular on this previously hidden intersection with Yeats, this paper examines the social network Skipsey was able to construct at the end of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it questions the silences that exist in the biography, exposing the ‘plan rigorously executed’ in its creation. ‘Unbound’ from unquestioned orthodoxy, Skipsey’s liminality is lessened and he is brought closer to the centre of Victorian literary culture.
The Epistolary Research Network (TERN) symposium at Bangor University: ‘Correspondence & Communities’., 2018
In writing the biography of Joseph Skipsey (1832-1903), the lawyer, Quaker, and Freemason Robert ... more In writing the biography of Joseph Skipsey (1832-1903), the lawyer, Quaker, and Freemason Robert Spence Watson (1837-1911) sought to secure the legacy of his coal-miner poet friend. He was “not content” that Skipsey “should become a mere memory without giving those of his countrymen […] the opportunity of knowing who he was and what he did”. On the whole Spence Watson is successful and, without his work, Skipsey may well have been forgotten. Yet, it is for his association with the Victorian artist-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) for which he is remembered and a few lines of correspondence, reprinted in Joseph Skipsey: his life and work (1909), in which Rossetti admired Skipsey’s poetry.
Due to imbalances in what Pierre Bourdieu termed cultural and social capital the relationship between Skipsey and Rossetti has only ever been viewed from one-side: through Rossetti’s eyes and with Skipsey’s voice silenced. This paper will examine the correspondence between Skipsey and Rossetti in terms of cultural and social capital and how letters that crossed geographical and class boundaries became and have become transmitters and signifiers of these forms of capital. In this, letters are transformed from items carrying social capital between recipients into objectified capital that acts as a guarantor of Skipsey’s embodied capital, ensuring he is remembered as “one of the few working men taken up by a literary circle”. While Skipsey is subordinate to Rossetti in this process of taking up, his letters from the artist have brought him closer to the coal fire at the heart of Victorian society.
Networks, Tastes and Material Culture: Archives in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Research Network workshop at John Rylands Library: (Dis)connections: Networks and Archival Absences., 2018
In her poem ‘Cartographies of Silence’, Adrienne Rich warns that silence should not be taken as a... more In her poem ‘Cartographies of Silence’, Adrienne Rich warns that silence should not be taken as an indication “of absence”. Instead, it implies the existence of “a plan rigorously executed” acting to supress the liminal and the powerless. This ‘plan’ becomes a conspiracy of silence that exists in the unquestioned orthodoxies surrounding those in possession of significant volumes of, what Pierre Bourdieu termed, cultural and social capital. The silence is only broken when those at society’s fringes engage with the culturally powerful; at this point of intersection, ‘lost’ voices become heard and legacies are created.
Despite being doubly disadvantaged by his peripheral location and social class, the Northumbrian working-class poet Joseph Skipsey was more fortunate than most. Becoming friendly with the lawyer, Quaker, and Freemason Robert Spence Watson, Skipsey’s legacy was secured in a biography written by Spence Watson who was not satisfied for his friend “to become a mere memory”. In this, however, Spence Watson’s voice, endorsed by his cultural and social capital, becomes an unquestioned orthodoxy in itself; the biography becomes a site of social control where power structures exist in perpetuity.
This paper examines a single piece of correspondence written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Skipsey to explore how an archival silence has been constructed by a middle-class arbiter. This one letter forms the basis of Skipsey’s literary afterlife yet only exists in scholarship in fragmentary form to create an imbalanced view of the relationship between the artist and the poet. While the silence of the archive can be seen as an expunging from cultural memory of less culturally-powerful individuals, the part-reproduction of a letter in a biography, and the subsequent critical reception, constitutes a more nefarious, deliberately created, silence – as Adrienne Rich suggests, a plan rigorously executed.
University of Hull, Northern Nineteenth-Century Network event: ‘Nineteenth-Century Tyrannies’., 2015
At a mass meeting of 30,000 pitmen during the bitter and acrimonious miners’ strike in 1844, one ... more At a mass meeting of 30,000 pitmen during the bitter and acrimonious miners’ strike in 1844, one union member carried with him a placard that read:
“Stand firm to your union,
Brave sons of the mine,
And we’ll conquer the tyrants
Of Tees, Wear, and Tyne.”
The tyrants he denounced were the coalowners against whom the pitmen of the Great Northern Coalfield had struck for nineteen weeks before desperation and starvation drove them back to work crushed in defeat. Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), records that although the strike was defeated it “had torn the miners of the North of England forever from the intellectual death in which they had hitherto lain” and the workers had made their first great strides in throwing off the chains of their exploitation. While it would take the privatisation of the coal industry almost a century later before workers and employers had anything approaching equanimity in their relationship, the treatment miners were subjected to in the summer of 1844, in particular the actions of the Marquis of Londonderry, was certainly an oppressive exercise of the power of capital.
Focussing on the Great Strike of 1844, this paper examines some of the literary responses from both sides of the struggle between labour and capital and in doing so illustrates how the reception of striking miners has been controlled by those with the power to do so. It also shows how the portrayal and treatment of miners struggling for improved working conditions has changed little in the intervening years and how this most recognisable class of worker has been demonised, despised, and ultimately defeated time and again by both employers and the state.
Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies’ one day colloquium: ‘Muck and Brass, Money and Finance in Victorian Britain.’, 2012
On January 16th 1862 the cast iron beam holding the pumping engine at Hester Pit fractured and 40... more On January 16th 1862 the cast iron beam holding the pumping engine at Hester Pit fractured and 40 tonnes of debris fell and blocked the pit’s only shaft; this accident thrust the small Northumbrian mining village of New Hartley into the national news. As reporters from The Times and the Illustrated London News followed attempts to rescue the 199 men and boys trapped underground, British society was gripped by unfolding events; Queen Victoria, grieving for the death of her Prince Regent, sent telegrams of support to the village as a nation seemed to project their own grief for the loss of Albert onto the trapped men. The obvious perils of having just one access into a pit had been observed decades previously but, as the cost of sinking a second shaft was deemed to be uneconomic, the single shift system was still the dominant method of extracting coal. As the corpses of every one of the trapped were recovered from their underground tomb, however, the nation’s grief masked feelings of guilt that every household that burned coal on its hearth was complicit in constructing a business model whose rampant economising had allowed such a disaster to occur.
The Hartley Calamity elicited numerous emotional, economic, and poetic responses as a society, which placed the home and, in particular, the hearth at its emblematic centre, began to see the human cost of burning cheap coal for the very first time. This paper examines the responses of Tyneside poets such as Joseph Skipsey, Joe Wilson, and J P Robson, alongside those of the Irish poet James Henry to illustrate how different classes were able to affectively communicate the iniquities of the Victorian mining industry.
The University of York Centre for Women’s Studies’ conference: ‘Sport, Gender and Media’, 2012
While the sports media focus of 2012 fell upon the London Olympics there was also vast coverage o... more While the sports media focus of 2012 fell upon the London Olympics there was also vast coverage of England at UEFA’s European Championships in Poland and Ukraine, most of which focussed on on-field matters. However, in seemingly preparatory fashion, as early as April 2011 The Guardian ran a cautionary article regarding the levels of violence surrounding Polish domestic football and, in December, The Mirror announced that England fans travelling to Ukraine would be “heading into a cauldron of neo-Nazi violence” . Although hooliganism within English football stadia has been virtually eradicated, it appears the stain of the ‘English Disease’, and the fear of the contagion spreading, remains in the collective media mind.
This paper examines how the media representation of the football hooligan, a term which the media itself created in the 1960s, has been appropriated by popular culture in the form of ‘hoolie-lit’, or ‘kick and tell’ memoirs. By using Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque the paper views the appropriation of this subculture, in John King’s novel The Football Factory (1997) and Lexi Alexander’s film Green Street (2005), as a temporal space of authorized transgression and excess. This space, which sports media also creates, affords an implied audience, through scopophilic recognition, the opportunity to re-assert ‘traditional’ masculinities not usually afforded to them in everyday life; a space which could be described as a ‘zone of remasculinization’.
Papers by Gordon J Tait
Literature & History, 2016
This article examines an unpublished letter from Yeats to the ‘pitman-poet’ Joseph Skipsey, which... more This article examines an unpublished letter from Yeats to the ‘pitman-poet’ Joseph Skipsey, which gives new insight into the early career of Yeats and a deeper understanding of the possibilities and capabilities of the Victorian working-classes. It argues that, in Skipsey, Yeats found an English equivalent to the Irish peasant poet, a figure whose life and poetry was central to Yeats’s vision of Ireland and his nation’s literary revival. The article contends that, following the discovery of a letter from Yeats, Skipsey’s poetry and influence should be considered outside the bounds of the Pre-Raphaelite clique within which he is usually located.
Literature & History, Nov 2016
Correspondence between W. B. Yeats and the ‘pitman-poet’ Joseph Skipsey demonstrates new insight... more Correspondence between W. B. Yeats and the ‘pitman-poet’ Joseph Skipsey demonstrates new insights into the early careers of Yeats and a deeper understanding of the possibilities and capabilities of the Victorian working classes. This article argues that, in Skipsey, Yeats found an English equivalent to the Irish peasant poet whose life and poetry was central to his vision of Ireland and an integral part of the nation’s literary revival; a noble savage whose life and oral tradition was unsullied by rampant Victorian industrial capitalism.
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Conference Presentations by Gordon J Tait
This paper examines letters to and from Joseph Skipsey which show how his uncouth northern speech brought friendship with and influence over a generation of poets that included such prominent members of the Rhymers’ Club as Rhys, Ernest Radford, Arthur Symons, and W. B. Yeats. In doing so it will reveal a wider network of contacts that stretched from the fin-de-siècle centre to the periphery of the Great Northern Coalfield, and back again, that will broaden the understanding of the possibilities of a Victorian working-class poet as well as a hitherto unseen link between a writer known for his connection to the Pre-Raphaelites and a group of poets deeply influenced by the works of Rossetti in particular.
The meeting between Skipsey and Rossetti brought together very different spheres of existence, the liminal and the central, the working-class and the avant-garde, and while this intersection has been noted no actual examination of their relationship has taken place. Drawing on studies of the androgyne in nineteenth-century culture, this paper investigates Skipsey’s engagements with Rossetti and suggest that, following their meeting, Rossetti created a hybrid identity for Skipsey that placed the ‘pitman poet’ beyond the identity defining boundaries of class, work, and gender.
Despite being doubly disadvantaged by his peripheral location and social class, the Northumbrian working-class poet Joseph Skipsey was more fortunate than most. Becoming friendly with the lawyer, Quaker, and Freemason Robert Spence Watson, Skipsey’s legacy was secured in a biography written by Spence Watson who was not satisfied for his friend “to become a mere memory”. In this, however, Spence Watson’s voice, endorsed by his cultural and social capital, becomes an unquestioned orthodoxy in itself; the biography becomes a site of social control where power structures exist in perpetuity.
However, a recently discovered letter from W. B. Yeats to Joseph Skipsey, and its absence from the biography, begins to destabilise this orthodoxy. Focussing in particular on this previously hidden intersection with Yeats, this paper examines the social network Skipsey was able to construct at the end of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it questions the silences that exist in the biography, exposing the ‘plan rigorously executed’ in its creation. ‘Unbound’ from unquestioned orthodoxy, Skipsey’s liminality is lessened and he is brought closer to the centre of Victorian literary culture.
Due to imbalances in what Pierre Bourdieu termed cultural and social capital the relationship between Skipsey and Rossetti has only ever been viewed from one-side: through Rossetti’s eyes and with Skipsey’s voice silenced. This paper will examine the correspondence between Skipsey and Rossetti in terms of cultural and social capital and how letters that crossed geographical and class boundaries became and have become transmitters and signifiers of these forms of capital. In this, letters are transformed from items carrying social capital between recipients into objectified capital that acts as a guarantor of Skipsey’s embodied capital, ensuring he is remembered as “one of the few working men taken up by a literary circle”. While Skipsey is subordinate to Rossetti in this process of taking up, his letters from the artist have brought him closer to the coal fire at the heart of Victorian society.
Despite being doubly disadvantaged by his peripheral location and social class, the Northumbrian working-class poet Joseph Skipsey was more fortunate than most. Becoming friendly with the lawyer, Quaker, and Freemason Robert Spence Watson, Skipsey’s legacy was secured in a biography written by Spence Watson who was not satisfied for his friend “to become a mere memory”. In this, however, Spence Watson’s voice, endorsed by his cultural and social capital, becomes an unquestioned orthodoxy in itself; the biography becomes a site of social control where power structures exist in perpetuity.
This paper examines a single piece of correspondence written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Skipsey to explore how an archival silence has been constructed by a middle-class arbiter. This one letter forms the basis of Skipsey’s literary afterlife yet only exists in scholarship in fragmentary form to create an imbalanced view of the relationship between the artist and the poet. While the silence of the archive can be seen as an expunging from cultural memory of less culturally-powerful individuals, the part-reproduction of a letter in a biography, and the subsequent critical reception, constitutes a more nefarious, deliberately created, silence – as Adrienne Rich suggests, a plan rigorously executed.
“Stand firm to your union,
Brave sons of the mine,
And we’ll conquer the tyrants
Of Tees, Wear, and Tyne.”
The tyrants he denounced were the coalowners against whom the pitmen of the Great Northern Coalfield had struck for nineteen weeks before desperation and starvation drove them back to work crushed in defeat. Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), records that although the strike was defeated it “had torn the miners of the North of England forever from the intellectual death in which they had hitherto lain” and the workers had made their first great strides in throwing off the chains of their exploitation. While it would take the privatisation of the coal industry almost a century later before workers and employers had anything approaching equanimity in their relationship, the treatment miners were subjected to in the summer of 1844, in particular the actions of the Marquis of Londonderry, was certainly an oppressive exercise of the power of capital.
Focussing on the Great Strike of 1844, this paper examines some of the literary responses from both sides of the struggle between labour and capital and in doing so illustrates how the reception of striking miners has been controlled by those with the power to do so. It also shows how the portrayal and treatment of miners struggling for improved working conditions has changed little in the intervening years and how this most recognisable class of worker has been demonised, despised, and ultimately defeated time and again by both employers and the state.
The Hartley Calamity elicited numerous emotional, economic, and poetic responses as a society, which placed the home and, in particular, the hearth at its emblematic centre, began to see the human cost of burning cheap coal for the very first time. This paper examines the responses of Tyneside poets such as Joseph Skipsey, Joe Wilson, and J P Robson, alongside those of the Irish poet James Henry to illustrate how different classes were able to affectively communicate the iniquities of the Victorian mining industry.
This paper examines how the media representation of the football hooligan, a term which the media itself created in the 1960s, has been appropriated by popular culture in the form of ‘hoolie-lit’, or ‘kick and tell’ memoirs. By using Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque the paper views the appropriation of this subculture, in John King’s novel The Football Factory (1997) and Lexi Alexander’s film Green Street (2005), as a temporal space of authorized transgression and excess. This space, which sports media also creates, affords an implied audience, through scopophilic recognition, the opportunity to re-assert ‘traditional’ masculinities not usually afforded to them in everyday life; a space which could be described as a ‘zone of remasculinization’.
Papers by Gordon J Tait
This paper examines letters to and from Joseph Skipsey which show how his uncouth northern speech brought friendship with and influence over a generation of poets that included such prominent members of the Rhymers’ Club as Rhys, Ernest Radford, Arthur Symons, and W. B. Yeats. In doing so it will reveal a wider network of contacts that stretched from the fin-de-siècle centre to the periphery of the Great Northern Coalfield, and back again, that will broaden the understanding of the possibilities of a Victorian working-class poet as well as a hitherto unseen link between a writer known for his connection to the Pre-Raphaelites and a group of poets deeply influenced by the works of Rossetti in particular.
The meeting between Skipsey and Rossetti brought together very different spheres of existence, the liminal and the central, the working-class and the avant-garde, and while this intersection has been noted no actual examination of their relationship has taken place. Drawing on studies of the androgyne in nineteenth-century culture, this paper investigates Skipsey’s engagements with Rossetti and suggest that, following their meeting, Rossetti created a hybrid identity for Skipsey that placed the ‘pitman poet’ beyond the identity defining boundaries of class, work, and gender.
Despite being doubly disadvantaged by his peripheral location and social class, the Northumbrian working-class poet Joseph Skipsey was more fortunate than most. Becoming friendly with the lawyer, Quaker, and Freemason Robert Spence Watson, Skipsey’s legacy was secured in a biography written by Spence Watson who was not satisfied for his friend “to become a mere memory”. In this, however, Spence Watson’s voice, endorsed by his cultural and social capital, becomes an unquestioned orthodoxy in itself; the biography becomes a site of social control where power structures exist in perpetuity.
However, a recently discovered letter from W. B. Yeats to Joseph Skipsey, and its absence from the biography, begins to destabilise this orthodoxy. Focussing in particular on this previously hidden intersection with Yeats, this paper examines the social network Skipsey was able to construct at the end of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it questions the silences that exist in the biography, exposing the ‘plan rigorously executed’ in its creation. ‘Unbound’ from unquestioned orthodoxy, Skipsey’s liminality is lessened and he is brought closer to the centre of Victorian literary culture.
Due to imbalances in what Pierre Bourdieu termed cultural and social capital the relationship between Skipsey and Rossetti has only ever been viewed from one-side: through Rossetti’s eyes and with Skipsey’s voice silenced. This paper will examine the correspondence between Skipsey and Rossetti in terms of cultural and social capital and how letters that crossed geographical and class boundaries became and have become transmitters and signifiers of these forms of capital. In this, letters are transformed from items carrying social capital between recipients into objectified capital that acts as a guarantor of Skipsey’s embodied capital, ensuring he is remembered as “one of the few working men taken up by a literary circle”. While Skipsey is subordinate to Rossetti in this process of taking up, his letters from the artist have brought him closer to the coal fire at the heart of Victorian society.
Despite being doubly disadvantaged by his peripheral location and social class, the Northumbrian working-class poet Joseph Skipsey was more fortunate than most. Becoming friendly with the lawyer, Quaker, and Freemason Robert Spence Watson, Skipsey’s legacy was secured in a biography written by Spence Watson who was not satisfied for his friend “to become a mere memory”. In this, however, Spence Watson’s voice, endorsed by his cultural and social capital, becomes an unquestioned orthodoxy in itself; the biography becomes a site of social control where power structures exist in perpetuity.
This paper examines a single piece of correspondence written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Skipsey to explore how an archival silence has been constructed by a middle-class arbiter. This one letter forms the basis of Skipsey’s literary afterlife yet only exists in scholarship in fragmentary form to create an imbalanced view of the relationship between the artist and the poet. While the silence of the archive can be seen as an expunging from cultural memory of less culturally-powerful individuals, the part-reproduction of a letter in a biography, and the subsequent critical reception, constitutes a more nefarious, deliberately created, silence – as Adrienne Rich suggests, a plan rigorously executed.
“Stand firm to your union,
Brave sons of the mine,
And we’ll conquer the tyrants
Of Tees, Wear, and Tyne.”
The tyrants he denounced were the coalowners against whom the pitmen of the Great Northern Coalfield had struck for nineteen weeks before desperation and starvation drove them back to work crushed in defeat. Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), records that although the strike was defeated it “had torn the miners of the North of England forever from the intellectual death in which they had hitherto lain” and the workers had made their first great strides in throwing off the chains of their exploitation. While it would take the privatisation of the coal industry almost a century later before workers and employers had anything approaching equanimity in their relationship, the treatment miners were subjected to in the summer of 1844, in particular the actions of the Marquis of Londonderry, was certainly an oppressive exercise of the power of capital.
Focussing on the Great Strike of 1844, this paper examines some of the literary responses from both sides of the struggle between labour and capital and in doing so illustrates how the reception of striking miners has been controlled by those with the power to do so. It also shows how the portrayal and treatment of miners struggling for improved working conditions has changed little in the intervening years and how this most recognisable class of worker has been demonised, despised, and ultimately defeated time and again by both employers and the state.
The Hartley Calamity elicited numerous emotional, economic, and poetic responses as a society, which placed the home and, in particular, the hearth at its emblematic centre, began to see the human cost of burning cheap coal for the very first time. This paper examines the responses of Tyneside poets such as Joseph Skipsey, Joe Wilson, and J P Robson, alongside those of the Irish poet James Henry to illustrate how different classes were able to affectively communicate the iniquities of the Victorian mining industry.
This paper examines how the media representation of the football hooligan, a term which the media itself created in the 1960s, has been appropriated by popular culture in the form of ‘hoolie-lit’, or ‘kick and tell’ memoirs. By using Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque the paper views the appropriation of this subculture, in John King’s novel The Football Factory (1997) and Lexi Alexander’s film Green Street (2005), as a temporal space of authorized transgression and excess. This space, which sports media also creates, affords an implied audience, through scopophilic recognition, the opportunity to re-assert ‘traditional’ masculinities not usually afforded to them in everyday life; a space which could be described as a ‘zone of remasculinization’.