What were the chief characteristics of the new social democratic system of government that developed in Britain between 1931 and 1976?

This chapter uncovers the unintended trajectory of Taiwanese women’s freedom among younger adopted daughters in the Japanese colonial courts. Family-centric, gender-based physical unfreedom continued to be one of the salient administrative and legal problems in Taiwan from the precolonial period to the late 1910s. Male household heads were not ready to follow the judicial construction of women’s freedom of movement during the early to mid-1920s. However, Japanese judges involved with female litigants shifted their focus to women’s freedom of choice – defined by intent and contractual freedom among adopted daughters – as a new boundary delineating their relationships with households in civil and criminal cases in the late 1920s. Women’s choice continued to be a central point of dispute when adopted daughters became targets of their parents and strangers. These daughters’ ambiguous capacity regarding their age, class background, and sexual integrity was misrepresented to legitimize their adverse labor and life conditions, including sex work. Yet, it was within the flexible contours of choice that the courts protected women’s agency, which, in turn, became a constitutive part of colonial history.

This chapter considers the relationship between masculinity, work, and the body in Hopkins’s poetry, focussing in particular on the idealization of working-class bodies in ‘Felix Randal’, ‘Harry Ploughman’, and ‘Tom’s Garland’. It explores Hopkins’s engagement with the ‘Gospel of Work’ in the nineteenth century, situating his works alongside that of writers such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle. It also examines the significance of broader social developments in the period: the rise of ‘muscular Christianity’, the socialist unrest of the late 1880s, and increasing medical concerns about overwork and leisure. The final section turns to Hopkins’s journals to consider his preoccupation with forms of productive labour, especially as this relates to self-regulation and sexual continence. In closing, the chapter considers Hopkins’s fraught engagement with the poetry of Walt Whitman and its eroticized representations of the male body.

This chapter explores inclusions and exclusions embedded within the Omani economy as experienced by citizens and foreigners. The chapter shows, first, that contestations around labour market belonging and experiences emerge within the local structures of segmentation and the global nature of Oman’s labour market. Second, in order to understand economic belonging and citizenship in the Gulf, class has to take a central role. The production of difference and competing identities of local regionalism, tribal and community affiliation, religion, interior and coastal cultures, race, heritage, and gender all matter but need to be understood alongside the intervening variable of class. The subjectivity of experiences and perceptions of inclusion and exclusion exposes how the politics and practice of difference in global capitalism produces tensions, value, and forms of power that manifest in labour and class relations. These dynamics also generate resistance and contestation around the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.

The chapter introduces the book, its main claims, and arguments. It is concerned with setting the agenda for how to take labour seriously in Gulf development discourses and the value of centring labour from the margins. The book argues that Oman’s labour market is global and that Omani labour needs to be understood globally and relationally within and beyond the segmentations that divide the labour market. The chapter situates youth and their economic dreams and experiences at the heart of the story of development, discusses how to understand labour within the rentier state, and lays out the framework and empirical analysis to follow.

The creators of West Side Story were liberal artists who updated Romeo and Juliet amidst youth gangs and racism, and each felt the sting of discrimination because they were Jewish and gay, but neither good intentions nor their own status as ‘Others’ in American society allowed them to realize fully the class advantages they had over the Puerto Rican minorities depicted in their show. Through consideration of Theodor Adorno’s concept of ‘Culture Industry,’ what one learns about Bernstein from his 1970 meeting with the Black Panthers immortalized as ‘Radical Chic’ by Tom Wolfe, Teju Cole’s concept of the ‘White Savior Industrial Complex,’ how the show has been cast, and other lenses, the author demonstrates how West Side Story can be described as insensitive in areas of class, the politics of colour, and race. The chapter also considers Bernstein’s cultural appropriation of African American and Latinx tropes in his music.

This chapter is concerned with recentring labour in regional development accounts and framing the claim of the book that the labour markets of Oman and the region are global. Most development accounts articulate Oman’s labour market as an object of development, a self-contained unit to be regulated and deregulated toward developmental ends. Development policy and academic discourse, in short, treat the labour market as a bounded, local space with enclosed, segmented social relations. In contrast to this development planning imaginary, this chapter argues that the labour market needs to be interpreted in global context and with a view of how regulation and relations transpire within, between, and across segmentations. The labour market is a place in which you can clearly see the outcomes of global market pressures and the competing poles for labour’s management and (de)regulation. These come from within but also outside national and regional boundaries. In combination, by looking from the bottom up, the labour market offers a space where we encounter humans in the economy and can more clearly visualise the human impact of economic transformations and choices.

The Yorkshire novelist Storm Jameson wrote that her work tended to ‘sag beneath my great ideas’, as she fought to reconcile her own frustrations with a world of isms and inconsistencies. This chapter explores In the Second Year (1936) Storm Jameson’s dystopian vision of fascist Britain and what this might look like. Like many of her other novels is waterlogged with dialogues and monologues which seek to unpack and explore the great ideas of the age - modernity; capitalism; materialism; individualism - and the ways in which they inform and underpin the attractions of a particularly British fascism, one fashioned in a crucible of class prejudices, the public school system and growing inequality.

This essay revisits the relationship between Clare’s mental and physical health and his writings by considering the importance of taking him on his own terms. Appraising the critical history of diagnostic approaches towards Clare’s mental and physical distress, it suggests that such categoric approaches to the poet’s psychophysiological life are unsatisfactory. It turns instead to a key term that Clare used repeatedly to describe his varied forms of disorder – his ‘indisposition’ – and argues that it remains important to Clare and to us as readers of him because of its dislocating and indecisive potential. Considering his unsettled position within the medical and literary culture in which he lived, and broadening the range of his medical encounters and vocabulary beyond the narrow context of the asylum, the essay discuss Clare’s symptoms and his poetic representations of them as entangled with his mobility across, and unstable status within, different places, social worlds, and identities.

Chapter 2 argues that syncretism, a form of eclectic union, is temporal as well as spatial. As a temporal form, syncretism consolidates historical events, daily individual experiences, and social practices onto a shared plane. This chapter analyzes syncretism in Risorgimento Florence, examining how the city adapts to serve modern Italy while maintaining its historical significance. I read Florence through the travel narratives of Susan Horner, two guidebooks (Walks in Florence, which Horner coauthored with her sister Joanna; and Mornings in Florence by John Ruskin), and a forgotten novel (Isolina, which I attribute to Susan Horner). Across these genres, syncretism emerges as a temporal form capable of defining liberty democratically so that Florence potentially serves as a model of egalitarianism internationally in response to nineteenth-century revolutions and wars.

The Vicar of Wakefield is a tale with marriage at its core. This chapter puts that preoccupation in historical and cultural context, accounting for the importance of the Whistonian controversy and Hardwicke Marriage Act of 1753 as backdrops to a novel which does not merely reflect its time, but anticipates subsequent treatments of the institution of marriage in fiction.

This chapter explores contexts for Goldsmith’s career as a playwright, such as competition between Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres that were factors in the moderate success of The Good Natur’d Man in 1768 and the surprise runaway hit that was She Stoops to Conquer five years later. These plays are considered in the light of how the Seven Years’ War, which greatly expanded the British empire, challenged conceptions of Britishness at home and abroad. Goldsmith’s comedies respond to the perceived effeminization of culture in the 1770s, associated with the possibility corrupting influence of luxury and commerce as a result of imperial expansion. This influence was manifested in new kinds of fashionable sociability such as the masquerade with its uppity women, and the phenomenon of the male ‘macaroni’. Goldsmith also tests the conventions of the comedy of manners in how he deploys minor characters in The Good Natur’d Man and the cross-class appeal of Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer.

This chapter explains why the topic of Mexican American culture became especially urgent during the 1960s and 1970s, and shows why this emphasis on culture came under question during the 1980s. Arellano describes how the Chicano literary intervention was crucial for exposing reductive caricatures by providing more nuanced characterizations of Mexican Americans. This focus on nuanced characterization, however, ultimately risked obfuscating the damaging effects of class struggle. Referencing the competing visions of Tomás Rivera and Richard Rodriguez, concerning the value of culture, Arellano analyzes literary case studies by José Antonio Villarreal and Arturo Islas, showing how their emphasis on a shared ethnic identity occluded class inequality. Arellano concludes by analyzing Rolando Hinojosa’s novel We Happy Few, which reconsiders the legacy of Chicano activism, demonstrating how Hinojosa disarticulates the novel’s meaning from cultural unity and reconnects it to the needs of workers. The novel thus highlights a view of literature that takes Mexican American humanity as a given and directs readers’ critical attention toward the problems that arise from a society organized by class

Two widespread narratives attempt to account for the decline of social democratic parties over the past decades. The economic narrative points to these parties’ centrist positioning as the key cause and the Radical Left and Right as the key beneficiaries. By contrast, the cultural narrative focuses on the liberal positions of social democratic parties on new issues relating to cultural issues such as immigration, gender equality, and European integration and points to the Radical Right as key beneficiaries. What links these two narratives is the idea that Social Democrats have alienated the working class. In this chapter, we use individual-level survey data from eight countries to show that although social democratic parties have seen losses among all electoral groups, the voters who left social democratic parties were disproportionately centrist and educated. Second, we find that only a small share of former social democratic voters defected directly to parties of the Radical Right. Instead, social democratic parties lost most voters to moderate right, green, and left-libertarian parties. We additionally show that cultural attitudes play only a small role for choosing between moderate right and social democratic parties. By contrast, they are strongly linked to choices between social democratic and green/left-libertarian parties. These findings cast doubt on both predominant narratives of social democratic decline.

The radical Right has turned to the Left’s iconic hero Antonio Gramsci for inspiration and guidance on how to launch a counter-hegemonic struggle against liberal cultural and political domination. Gramsci provides a powerful way to understand the globalisation of the Right, and many of Gramsci’s ideas, particularly cultural hegemony, historic blocs, and counter-hegemonic movements have been self-consciously and strategically appropriated by the Right. What radical Right intellectuals call ‘metapolitics’ provides them with a global sociological, ideological, and political framing, as well as a political economy with capitalism and class at its centre. It provides a strategic direction that seeks to mobilise social forces produced and marginalised by liberalism and globalisation by bringing them to self-consciousness, turning them from classes in themselves to politically aware and active classes for themselves. The global Right is not ideologically unified, nor does it have centralised controlling institutions. Instead, their counter-hegemonic ideologies enable diverse actors and agendas to find common cause despite their differences.

To support experiential learning, HLVC data are available for research (by permission, and with protections for the participants). This chapter illustrates the integration of research and community-engaged learning, which is critical to the success of the project. It presents activities that support critical and creative thinking, enable theoretical knowledge to be empirically tested, and facilitate and enhance quantitative reasoning, information literacy, and the communication of research. It includes a section on how to best conduct and teach research methods to support the vitality of the languages being examined and one on ethical practices. Sociolinguistics trails other subfields in analyzing data outside the majority language (English). With these supports, students can change this situation. The exercises exemplify tasks that students have undertaken and can help others get started. Exercises provide prompts and show how to gain access to instruments and data. In addition, the course Exploring Heritage Languages, which has modules that can be (adapted and) used, is introduced. The HLVC corpus and these modules provide instructional infrastructure to scaffold undergraduate and graduate class assignments teaching relevant theory and research skills.