ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the cluster of articles on imaginative representations of the working class. The text notes that in working-class studies, as in women’s studies, scholarly work began with discovery or reclamation of texts. To understand and explain working-class texts, working-class scholars developed intersectional and interdisciplinary research. This introductory piece traces influential writings on working-class texts from the 1990s until 2017. Doing so enables readers to consider how the contributors to The Routledge Handbook of Working-Class Studies have built upon their predecessors’ findings. The authors of chapters in this text have broadened the scope of their investigation from Britain and/or the United States to the international Anglo world. Moreover, the authors have broadened the kinds of texts they examine to include popular media such as television, music, art, and documentaries. Regardless of the form they take, working-class texts represent working-class lives. To understand the working-class, artistic representations of it must be studied.
