tioners and admirerstothe struggles of the period.”²³Giventhe strongutopian
tendencies in the history of the British workingclass, it is not surprising that
the first arguments for emotions asaproductive category in culturalanalysis
werepresented by Marxist scholars E.P. Thompson and RaymondWilliams dur-
ing the 1950s, in the earlyyears of what would eventuallybecome British cultur-
al studies.Against communist orthodoxy and its insistenceonthe correct inter-
pretation of canonicaltexts,Thompson stressed the importance of common
experiencesinthe making of working-class consciousness.His often quoted in-
sistenceonsaving the ephemeral and the forgotten“from the enormous conde-
scension of posterity”can easilybeextended to the emotional attachments usu-
allyignored or dismissed by earlylabor historians and scholars of socialist
literature.²⁴Since then,the emergence of cultural studies as an academic disci-
pline and the various linguistic,material, and emotional turns have allowed re-
searchers across the disciplines to acknowledge the importance of popular cul-
ture and everydaylife and to recognize the close connection between
representational practicesand discourses of identity.This has included critical
self-reflection on the ways humanist conceptions of selfhood andauthenticity
have helpedto perpetuate the leftist romancewith the workingclass. The intel-
lectuals’infatuation with this modernversion of the folk, or the people, has
sometimesdistracted from the constitutive power of languageand the historical
nature of the discourses of class. With these largerquestions in mind, Gareth
StedmanJones in the 1980s became one of the firstto examine the languages
of class, recognizing that“consciousness cannot be related to experience except
through the interpretation ofaparticularlanguagewhich organizes the under-
standing of experience.”²⁵
Williams’swritingsonworking-class culture and what he calls structures of
feelingshaveplayedakey role in the emergence of culturalstudies. His contri-
bution appeared in the tradition of socialist humanism against which Stedman
Jones enlisted insights from the linguistic turn to shift the largerdebates
about class to questions of languageand signification. But preciselythrough
this embeddednessinanolder tradition of socialism,Williams’snotion of“struc-
Eric Hobsbawm,How to Change theWorld: Reflections onMarx andMarxism(New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press,2011),265.
EdwardPalmer Thompson,TheMaking of the EnglishWorking Class(NewYork: Vintage
Books, 1966), 12.
Gareth StedmanJones,Languages of Class: Studies in EnglishWorking-Class History1832–
1982 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1984), 101. On the discourse of class,also see Pat-
rickJoyce,Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848– 1914 (Cam-
bridge:Cambridge University Press, 1991).
74 Chapter 3