Abstract
The afterword suggests that focusing on ‘the words on the page’ allows us to reconstruct a web of meaning within which the most fundamental attitudes can be caught and interrogated. Since such interrogation reveals, at a linguistic level, the essentially collective processes of communication and identification vital to the construction of individual and communal identities, it should be possible to turn this method on its head, tracing cultural connections between seemingly isolated authors through coincidences in subversive usage, and thus reassembling further socio-literary communities of the 1930s. Taking seaman-novelist James Hanley as a case in point, it suggests some ways in which his use of escape might ally him with fellow Liverpool-Irish writers George Garrett and Jim Phelan, within a sub-culture queered by the exigencies of poverty and Catholicism.
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Notes
- 1.
Cohen, p. 114.
- 2.
Bergonzi, p. 7.
- 3.
Patrick Williams, ‘No Struggle but the Home: James Hanley’s The Furys,’ in Recharting the Thirties, ed. Patrick J. Quinn (London: Associated University Presses, 1996), pp. 134–45 (p. 135).
- 4.
Ken Worpole, Dockers and Detectives, 2nd edn (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2008), p. 107.
- 5.
John Belchem and Neville Kirk, ‘Introduction,’ in Languages of Labour, eds John Belchem and Neville Kirk (Farnham: Ashgate, 1997), pp. 1–8 (p. 2).
- 6.
For a more comprehensive assessment of the questions surrounding Hanley’s biography, see James Purdon, ‘James Hanley,’ in British Writers: Supplement XIX, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Scribner’s, 2012), pp. 71–86 (pp. 71–4).
- 7.
Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 279.
- 8.
John Belchem, ‘An Accent Exceedingly Rare: Scouse and the Inflexion of Class,’ in Languages of Labour, pp. 99–130 (pp. 103–4).
- 9.
Purdon, p. 71.
- 10.
James Hanley, Boy (Richmond: One World, 2007), p. 124.
- 11.
James Hanley, ‘The German Prisoner,’ in The Last Voyage and Other Stories (London: Harvill, 1997), pp. 45–80 (p. 73).
- 12.
James Hanley, The Furys (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), p. 121.
- 13.
Jim Phelan, Ten-a-Penny People: A Novel (London: Gollancz, 1938), p. 7.
- 14.
James Hanley, Drift (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1944), p. 18.
- 15.
Isherwood, Goodbye, p. 477.
- 16.
George Garrett, ‘Letter Unsigned,’ in The Collected George Garrett, ed. Michael Murphy (Nottingham: Trent, 1999), pp. 88–193 (p. 94).
- 17.
George Garrett, ‘The Jonah,’ in The Collected George Garrett, pp. 41–50 (p. 46).
- 18.
Jim Phelan, Lifer (London: Davies, 1938), p. 22.
- 19.
James Hanley, ‘A Passion before Death,’ in The Last Voyage, pp. 109–44 (p. 142).
- 20.
George Garrett, ‘Pent,’ in The Collected George Garrett, pp. 63–76 (p. 63).
- 21.
Hanley, Furys, p. 182.
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Charteris, C. (2019). Afterword: James Hanley and the Liverpool-Irish. In: The Queer Cultures of 1930s Prose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02414-7_5
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