The Birmingham Group

1 Introduction: 'They at Least Were Not Hybrids'.- A Multiplicity in Unity: The Birmingham Writers and Their City.- Shaping Influences: Finding the Exotic in the Everyday.- 'Going Over': The Cultural Diaspora.- 'At last the British are Coming': Prevailing and Contemporary Critiques of Working-Class Literature.- The Ethnographic Turn.- 2 This Working Life: Work and the Workplace.- A Fellow Traveller? Henry Green: Birmingham's Adoptive Proletarian.- Walter Allen: 'As a Film Director might present it': Blind Man's Ditch.- 'As Unpolitical a Man as I Have Ever Met': Leslie Halward.- Leslie Halward: 'Belcher's Hod'.- 3 Feeling the Pinch: Unemployment.- A Qualitative Deficit: Filling the Statistical Gap.- Walter Brierley: Frustration and Bitterness: A Colliery Banksman.- Walter Brierley: Means Test Man.- John Hampson: 'Man About the House'.- Walter Allen: Innocence Is Drowned.- 4 Writing Their Selves: Subjectivity and Representation in Birmingham Group Narrative.-A Reluctant Collier? Walter Brierley: 'Body'.- Walter Brierley: Sandwichman.- Leslie Halward: 'A Broken Engagement'.- Peter Chamberlain: An Eavesdropper's Secrets: 'Mr. Marris' Reputation' and 'What the Hell?'.- John Hampson: Saturday Night at the Greyhound.- 5 Conclusion.- Coda: Dispersal.- The Legacy.

Robin Harriott holds the degrees of B.A. (Hons), M. Phil., and was recently (2021) awarded his PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, UK. Formerly a teacher of English, he is now an independent researcher with interests in working-class writing and culture.