Dougal McNeill

Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill's book analyses the vast literary response to the 1926 General Strike. The Strike not only drew writers into political action but inspired literature that served to shape twentieth-century British views of class, culture and politics. While major figures active at the time wrote on or responded to this crucial moment, this is the first volume to address their respective works. Ferrall and McNeill show how novels then in progress, such as Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, were affected by the Strike, as well as the ways in which it has been remembered from the 1930s to the present. Their study sheds new light on the relationship between politics and literature of the modernist era.

Whatever happened to realism? What form is adequate to representing our moment, situated as we are after the end of ‘the end of History’? In the face of youth revolts and workers’ insurgencies from Cairo to London, it seems a good time to test the possibilities of alternative Marxist defences of contemporary realist fiction. Can realism’s techniques adequately represent the complexity of contemporary political organisation? This book reads key realist texts from recent decades in order to test their potential to produce the knowledge of history, industrial politics and the metropolis traditionally central to literary realism’s concerns. Positioning himself within and against the inspiration and models of Fredric Jameson’s literary theory, and drawing on innovative realist texts, the author seeks to draw the classic realism controversies of an earlier period in historical materialism into productive conversation with the debates framing the era of austerity.

The Many Lives of Galileo is a Marxist study of the development of Bertolt Brecht's great play Galileo on the English stage. Tracing various translations of Brecht's original, and the historical and political moments surrounding these translations, Dougal McNeill examines how, across the distances of culture, history and language, The Life of Galileo has come to figure so prominently in the life of English-language theatre. The translations and productions of Galileo by Charles Laughton, Howard Brenton and David Hare are examined, in a method combining close reading with an attention to broader social contexts, with an eye to uncovering their implications for drama in performance. Brecht valued re-creation, re-invention and re-telling as much as creation itself. In this book the author applies Brecht's aesthetic to translations of his own work, following Laughton, Brenton and Hare as they set themselves the task of rewriting Brecht and, in the process, use him to comment on their own eras.