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historicist vein applies to work on Harkness by literary scholars who have reconstructed her associations with the socialist movement and a variety of reform initiatives (slum housing, ‘visiting’ schemes, the Salvation Army) as lenses through which to examine her fiction. Her substantial record of journalism, especially that focused on labour conditions in London’s East End, and her oft-cited experience living in Whitechapel’s Katharine Buildings in the late 1880s, can reinforce the documentary character of her fiction.2 Gerd Bjørhovde typifies this interpretative pattern
disenchantment with the labour movement’s methods and uneven achievements, as well as some of its socialist practitioners, was growing. Even her long-standing relationship with Potter was reaching a breaking point, in spite of the fact that Harkness was shortly to introduce her to Sidney Webb, the Fabian economist and Potter’s eventual spouse, at her flat across from the British Museum in January 1890.5 In the summer of 1890 Harkness travelled to Germany and Austria and began to report on labour conditions in these two countries, interviewing prominent socialists such as
withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision’ (3). Neoliberal policy advocates a surrendering, to the greatest possible extent, of responsibilities to do with labour conditions, with basic resources and with healthcare. These become, not matters of state, but of enterprise: wages are determined by markets in order to maximise surplus value, access to infrastructure is
Kenyon, ‘Labour Conditions in Essex in the Reign of Richard II’, Economic History Review, 4 (1934), 438, 444. For the claim that some labourers in Suffolk received 6d per day during harvest, see Simon Penn and Christopher Dyer, ‘Wages and Earnings in Late Medieval England: Evidence from the Enforcement of the Labour Laws’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, 43:3 (1990), 369. 19 Analysing the Gospel parable in light of its contemporary economic context, William Herzog argues that Jesus told the parable to expose oppression of workers. See Parables as Subversive
a principal target of nineteenth-century social critique is the effect on human lives of the labour conditions imposed by industry, and the vulnerable economy of the family itself, play represents a figured escape from and counterdiscourse to those conditions. Hood’s engagement with childhood and his appeal to the child in the adult reader are integrally related to his opposition to a culture where the liberty of the human body can be forfeit to ‘want of L. S. D.’ and the control exerted by an exploitative labour market threatens the native and commonly held
prestige, occasionally ‘fast-tracking’ individual writers and allowing them to apply for UNEAC membership – the new survival mode created a new set of functions and value. With the decriminalisation of the dollar, swiftly followed by Law-Decree No 145 (November 1993), on labour conditions for creators of literary works (www.min.cult. cu/loader.php?sec=legislacion&cont=decretoley145), writers now had unprecedented freedom to seek contracts outside state mechanisms. The theme of money and culture in the Special Period has been amply discussed outside Cuba (Fernandes, 2003