ABSTRACT

Walter Greenwood is well known for his novel Love on the Dole (1933), which is remembered as the iconic British novel of the Depression, selling over forty-six thousand copies and being seen as a play by some three million people in Britain. Love on the Dole was regarded as authentic testimony from a working-class author who had experienced unemployment—an experience which in fact gave him the time to write. He did not begin by writing a novel, but by writing short stories about working-class life intended for fiction magazines. However, only one of these stories was accepted. It was not until 1937 that Greenwood published all the original short stories in a format very different from that first envisaged. They appeared in The Cleft Stick (1937), a co-produced book with the artist Arthur Wragg, who drew a monochrome illustration for each story, as well as the illustrated dust-wrapper. Both Greenwood and Wragg had a certain celebrity status as working-class artists, and the book sold well. Neither word nor image in The Cleft Stick has received any critical attention since its contemporary reviews, yet was widely written about then as a controversial prequel or sequel to Love on the Dole, and regarded as an important contribution to socially aware art in Britain and the United States. The Cleft Stick has not been reprinted since 1937, but it was an important working-class literary/artistic collaboration that should be rediscovered and reintroduced into critical conversations about the 1930s, artistic, literary and political.

摘要

沃尔特·格林伍德（Walter Greenwood）的小说《多尔之恋》（Love on the Dole，1933年）广为人知，该小说被认为是英国大萧条的标志性小说，售出四万六千册，被英国约三百万人视为戏剧。一位失业的工人阶级作家被视为对多尔的真爱的证词，这一经历实际上使他有时间写作。他不是从写小说开始的，而是从写关于小说杂志上有关工人阶级生活的短篇小说开始的。但是，这些故事中只有一个被接受。直到1937年，格林伍德才以与最初设想的格式完全不同的格式出版了所有原始短篇小说。他们出现在裂隙棒（1937），是与艺术家亚瑟·瓦格（Arthur Wragg）共同制作的书，后者为每个故事画了单色插图，并画了插图的除尘器。格林伍德和瓦格都是工人阶级的艺术家，并且畅销书。自从其当代评论以来，《裂痕棍》中的文字和图像都未受到任何关注，但当时被广泛地写成《多尔之恋》的有争议的前传或续集，并被视为对英国和美国社会意识艺术的重要贡献。美国。裂棒 自1937年以来就没有再版过，但是这是一次重要的工人阶级文学/艺术合作，应该重新发现并重新引入有关1930年代的艺术，文学和政治的重要对话中。