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A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LATE 18TH CENTURY BRITAIN AND LATE 20TH CENTURY NORTH BENGAL- IN THE CONTEXT OF CLASS
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Author(s):
DR. MOUMITA GHOSH BHATTACHARYYA
Vol - 6, Issue- 4 ,
Page(s) : 319 - 332
(2015 )
DOI : https://doi.org/10.32804/IRJMSH
Abstract
The study of literature allows us to think more critically about the complex social issues that surround us as young people in the early twenty-first century. By illustrating this function of literary studies, students need to be introduced directly to primary texts that offer different perspectives on human-centric themes such as problems of social class. To achieve this, close readings and written assignments are preferred. In approaching the teaching- learning process of literature in this manner, demonstration should be provided regarding the difficulties surrounding textual analysis. This process enables students to become more critical in analyzing not only the written works of the past but also common individual and social concerns in past and present. Literature’s cultural relevancy is focused by realizing the importance of literary studies in our own lives and society where gender, class and caste play a multidimensional role.
- ‘Edward Palmer Thompson was one of the first to see the working class as agents rather than cogs in the machine’- The Guardian, Dec 26, 2013.
- Dahrendorf, R. 1959: Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. Stanford , California: Stanford University Press. pp. 148-9.
- Thompson, Edward P. 1963: Preface to The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Penguin edition. A Pelican Book.
- The Battle of Havana (1762) was a military action from March to August 1762, as part of the Seven Years' War. British forces besieged and captured the city of Havana, which at the time was an important Spanish naval base in the Caribbean, and dealt a serious blow to the Spanish navy. Havana was subsequently returned to Spain under the 1763 Treaty of Paris that formally ended the war. (Fortescue, J. W., A History of the British Army Vol. II, MacMillan, London, 1899, pp. 541–544.)
- Allen, Robert C. 2009: The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press. p.1.
- Buzan, Barry and Lawson, George. 2013: The global transformation: the nineteenth century and the making of modern international relations. International studies quarterly, 59 (1). ISSN 0020-8833 (In Press). p.3. This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/44894/
- Ibid. p.17. De Vries, Jan. 2008: The Industrious Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Wolf, Eric. 1997: Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. P.78.
- Bayly, C.A. 2004: The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 189.
- Buzan, Barry and Lawson, George (2013) The global transformation: the nineteenth century and the making of modern international relations. International studies quarterly, 59 (1). ISSN 0020-8833 (In Press). p. 18.
- Thompson, Edward P. 1963: Preface to The Making of the English Working Class. Penguin edition
- While Blake had published both of these poems, as part of his collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience, by 1794, it took until 1848 before the topics he had addressed came to the official attention of the British Parliament. Of course, once these horrific realities became known, Parliament responded immediately by enacting the first public health laws in European history. The legislative body was persuaded to act by Sir Edwin Chadwick’s report, Inquiry into the Condition of the Poor, which documents the working class’s abysmal living conditions and daily struggles to survive (Kishlansky, Mark A. Sources of the West: Readings in Western Civilization. 5th ed. New York: Longman, 2003. (p. 127). Chadwick’s valiant work helped to change British society, yet these changes came well after many had suffered in miserable squalor. The conclusion of Conditions of the Poor mentions only one vocation specifically, and in doing so, calls for an outright ban on chimney sweeping.
- Ray, Nalini Ranjan. 2011: Rajbanshi Pride Coochbehar Issues- Unfinished Agenda. New Delhi.
- Hazarika, Sujata D.2004: ‘Unrest and displacement: Rajbanshis inNorth Bengal’, South Asia Forum for Human Rights. < http://www.safhr.org/refugee_watch17_4.htm>
- Basu, Swaraj. 2003: Dynamics of a Caste movement: The Rajbanshis of North Bengal, 1910-1947, New Delhi: Monohar. p.82.
- Ibid.
- Ibid. p.91.
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