The Image of Poverty of Factory Workers and of the Ways of Economic Emancipation in the Literature of the Pre-March and 1848 Revolution Periods
Abstract
The study views the literary production of the period before and during the 1848 revolution as a significant medium of intellectual debate concerning the modernization of the Central European area. It assumes that literary fiction was much more relevant to contemporary society and politics in the first half of the 19th century than it is today.
Modern industrial poverty is studied through its cultural images, being a new phenomenon brought about by industrialization and by accompanying dissolution of traditional social safeguards of workers. The main focus lies in social and political imagination of contemporary writers, which is perceived as an important source of reproduction, petrification, and even of transformation of mental structures of the society.