In several European countries, the United States, and the Soviet Union, remarkable industrial novels based on empirical observations were written between 1900 and 1970. With two successive world wars and the rise of communism and fascism, this was an exceptionally turbulent time in the history of industrial capitalism as Taylorism and Fordism sought to increase production and consumption. This social landscape shaped modernist industrial novels. Key themes in these novels were class conflict, bad working conditions, worker alienation, changing workmen and employee cultures, urbanization, and worker migration. The primary goal was to document and publicize the real developments of working conditions in factories and offices, often aiming to influence both company welfare work and state social policies. This book focuses on the modernist industrial novel as written in five large industrial nations: the United States before WWII, the Stalinist Soviet Union, Weimar Germany, post-WWII Italy, and France.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Note on sources
- 1 Bringing together the fields of sociology and literature: Towards an integration of Modernist industrial novels into industrial sociology
- Introduction
- Methodological considerations
- 2 The rise of welfare work capitalism and the Americanization of production processes in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union
- Welfare work capitalism in historical perspective
- The Americanization of production processes
- Consensual American hegemony and the politics of productivity after World War II
- 3 Between ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’: American 20th-century industrial novels
- Introduction
- Between utopia and dystopia
- Contextualizing American early-20th-century industrial novels
- Upton Sinclair’s industrial novels
- ‘U.S.A. is the speech of the People’: John Dos Passos’s experimental trilogy
- Conclusion
- 4 Socialist-realist industrial novels in the Leninist and Stalinist Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s
- Introduction
- Amerikansky Temp: Taylorism and Fordism in the Soviet Union
- The Soviet application of Taylorism: Shock brigades and Stakhanovism
- Socialist realism and the role of the industrial novel (Gorky and writers’ brigades)
- Yevgeny Zamyatin’s anti-Taylorism: We (1921)
- Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov’s Cement (1925)
- Ilja Ehrenburg’s The Life of the Automobile (1929)
- The Magnitogorsk steel works: Valentin Kataev’s Time, Forward! (1932) and John Scott’s memoir Behind the Urals (1942)
- Conclusion
- 5 New Objectivity industrial novels in Weimar Germany
- Introduction
- Weimar and Americanism
- Neue Sachlichkeit in literature
- Egon Erwin Kisch’s Der rasende Reporter (1924)
- Franz Jung’s Gequältes Volk (1927)
- Siegfried Kracauer’s Die Angestellten (1930)
- Willi Bredel’s Maschinenfabrik N. & K. (1930)
- Erik Reger’s Union der festen Hand (1931)
- Conclusion
- 6 Neo-realist industrial novels in post-war Italy: The Olivetti case
- Introduction
- The Italian context of welfare work capitalism in the 1950s
- Welfare work at Olivetti
- Adriano Olivetti’s communitarian utopia: Humana Civilitas
- Ottieri’s and Volponi’s neo-realist (Olivettian) industrial novels
- Conclusion
- 7 Simone Weil and Modernist industrial novels in France
- Introduction
- Taylorism in France
- Simone Weil and Georges Navel
- Other notable French neo-realist post-war industrial novels
- Conclusion
- 8 Transnational comparison and concluding reflection
- Introduction
- Cross-country comparison
- Surplus value of Modernist documentary industrial novels for the sociology of work
- Bibliography
- Index
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