Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 198-213).

In this thesis, I argue the case for putting the industrial revolution back into literary accounts of the Romantic period. Writers of fiction played an important part in disseminating knowledge about the changes to technology and society, as well as helping to form the image of the newest social class: that of the industrial workers. Literature aspired to educate and integrate this class, as well as to influence the parallel process of educating the upper classes about the advent of the new manufacturing order. I have taken as the governing metaphor for industrialization that of 'white slavery', drawing the contrast to the contemporary movement to abolish black slavery. To illustrate the thesis, I have chosen six writers: three Romantic poets - Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth - and three women educationalists - Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth and Harriet Martineau, each of whom represents a significant philosophical approach to a manufacturing society and who each made an important contribution to imaginative literature. Whilst the Romantic poets analysed industrialization as a divisive and demoralizing phenomenon and looked to the past for solutions, the educationalists responded to the challenge presented by the factory system by suggesting new visions of social relationships which bound moral and economic behaviour together. The thesis aspires to restore the voices of neglected women writers in the industrial debate with the aim of promoting a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the Romantic period and a fuller comprehension of its creative expression.

My dissertation, entitled "All Work and no Play? Labor, Literature and Industrial Modernity," analyzes writing about work that was mostly published in communist and anarchist newspapers during the Weimar Republic. Discussing texts that have been almost fully neglected, my approach departs from existing scholarship on Weimar in two significant ways: First, I analyze these texts in the context of the period's dominant theories, practices, psychologies, and utopian ideas concerning labor. Due to the proximity of artistic and industrial 'production' particularly in the minds and practices of Weimar communists, I consider these literary treatments of work also within the framework of literary and artistic meta-discourses during the Weimar Republic (e.g. Expressionism, New Objectivity, and Productivism). Second, investigating such controversial issues as industrialization, the division of labor, technology, progress, etc., my dissertation leads to a transnational (hi)story in which Weimar Germany can be viewed in the larger context of American imports such as Taylorism and Fordism, their Soviet variants, and pre-industrial counter-models. Chapters One and Two scrutinize communist discourse on work, with Chapter One focusing on the situation in Germany (especially the rationalization drive sweeping the Weimar Republic after 1924 and its literary representations in the communist newspaper Die rote Fahne) and Chapter Two discussing the complex cross-fertilization between German and Soviet communist politics and culture (Egon Erwin Kisch, Sergei Tretiakov, et al.). In these two chapters, I put forth a critique of dominant Marxism-Leninism at the time. Its fetishization of labor and modernization can be found in the texts I discuss (although in highly contradictory terms), and was at the core of the worker-authors' self-understanding as "engineers" of socialism. Chapters Three and Four present the challenge to communism's labor theories and artistic models that arises from various anarchist and syndicalist factions at the time -- groups I summarily call 'anti-authoritarian socialism.' Proposing a veritable exodus from industrial modernity in texts published in Fritz Kater's Der Syndikalist and Franz Pfemfert's Die Aktion, anti-authoritarian socialists ventured to mostly pre-industrial settings both within Germany (e.g. in the case of Heinrich Vogeler's Barkenhoff commune) and Mexico (in this case, through the work of B. Traven). / text