In this review, we argue from Sir Walter Scott’s historical fiction onward, literary representations of the traditional working class authorize claims about work, class, and historical development through a dual mechanism of moral urgency – the ethical imperative to address epochal suffering – and warrant claims – the text’s formal strategies that legitimize those imperatives as historically necessary.
Warranting the Working Class: Moral Urgency and Historical Authorization from Scott to Mann.
With an annotated bibliography, I map primary texts chronology showing how authors like Scott, Engels, Dickens, Veblen, Polanyi, and Thomas Mann refine an authorizing logic amid industrial capitalism’s unfolding crisis.
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