ABSTRACT
The publishing of working-class poets takes place in a world of acute imbalances of power and wealth, which operate to control and censor – and the kinds of control and censorship used offer striking similarities across centuries. The sense of random distribution of rewards is one that recurs frequently in working-class literature and life, derived no doubt from an accurate sense that, for the working-class, luck rather than merit offers the best chance of self-improvement. Prejudices and unquestioned assumptions about class – less subject to investigation than prejudices about race and gender – hold sway. James Kelman addresses the limits of both kinds of collaboration for working-class writers. Henry Frank Lott is at least aware of the implicit criticism of what he takes as the canonical authority of Gray's poetry. But there are further problems in the collaboration working-class writers sense they must have with dead writers.
