ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the breakdown of knowable working-class communities and the end of particular types of ‘traditional’ working-class masculinities. The chapter uses Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), Barry Hines’s Looks and Smiles (1981), and Tony Harrison’s book-length poem v. (1985) to explore the effect of chronic unemployment upon the formation and maintenance of working-class masculinities against a backdrop of the consolidation of the hegemony of the New Right and Thatcherism. The chapter then analyses Martin Amis’s Money (1985) to demonstrate the emergence of a newly dominant form of working-class masculinity. The chapter outlines how, under the New Right, ‘hegemonic individualism’ and ‘imposed individualism’ emerge as distinct structural forms. The chapter concludes by offering the work of James Kelman (specifically The Busconductor Hines [1984]) as a continuation of the democratising urge present in the work of writers such as Alexander Baron, arguing that hope for the future is embedded within its form.
