Phyllis Mary Ashraf:

43) Introduction to working class literature in Great Britain. Part I and II.

Oberlungwitz 1978

The two-volume work is both a detailed anthology of working class literature and a critical study on the subject. The first part deals with poetry while the second focuses on prose.

Phyllis Mary Ashraf had been a researcher at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism in Moscow, where she had stepped into the footprints of Yuri Kovalev. She then took on a university post in East-Berlin, where she established herself as the one of the foremost scholars of British working-class culture with publications on Thomas Spence and on Afro-English radicals. Here, she refers to Linton as a spiritus rector of James Watsons’s forward-looking publishing programme. As a poet she considered him to have changed sides after the frustrations of 1848, from proto-communist radicalism to a variation of romantic republicanism.