Working-class women: elegy, agency and authorship in narratives of the deindustrialised North.

This project will argue that artistic depictions of the British working-class from the period in which deindustrialisation took place (c.1950-1990) are marked by a sense of loss, even elegy, in relation to the past. While previous explorations of working-class elegy have focused on the loss of masculine industrial labour (Dave 2003; Russell 2004), I will define this sense of loss more broadly, focusing instead on how it relates to working-class women. I will use a methodological approach which challenges auteurist modes of authorship to explore the ways in which working-class women serve as narrative and creative subjects in their own right.