Work it : the creation of angry young spaces in Northern soul music and kitchen sink drama -

Abstract

This thesis presents a comparative reading between Northern Soul music and kitchen sink drama and literature in working class contexts in 1950s and 1960s Northern England. Conducting the reading on different genres of texts will allow for a more thorough and inclusive understanding of the working class pop and literary cultures in postwar Britain. The reading will allow for a better understanding of the different private spaces that the working class in postwar Britain has created for itself, and how the subcultural identity of the angry young man articulates similar and different practices and understandings of race, power and gender between the dancefloor and the literary text. The introduction will provide the sociopolitical background of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by Chapter 1 where the literature review will be presented along with a summary of some of the major critical paradigms to be used, mainly those of hegemony and private spaces. Chapter 2 will focus on three major kitchen sink plays: John Osborne’s The Entertainer and Look Back in Anger and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. The theme of anger will be the major focus, especially in the ways it defines and create the working class protagonists’ different private spaces as different reactions to the socioeconomic status quo. These spaces will be then be compared to the space that is the dancefloor in Northern Soul venues, from the dancing techniques to the dynamics that helped define the subcultural identity of dancers and fans. The comparative reading will follow more thoroughly in Chapter 3, drawing on two major Northern Soul songs that will be lyrically analyzed and compared to a major kitchen sink novel: John Braine’s Room at the Top. In this conclusive chapter, social mobility, or lack thereof, will be examined and compared across the different private spaces between the working class literature and the Northern Soul dancefloor, with specific attention to the issue of race as a major component of the forma