Foreclosure, a Special Issue of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism
British cultural production has a long history of foreclosure. Understood as a premature abandonment, or an abortive failure, of radical political projects, foreclosure has an imaginative and material register in working-class writing, which has been read since the 1930s as failing to experiment, relying on realism without meaningful engagement with questions of literary form. This view has been challenged by literary scholars, who have demonstrated that formal experimentation did exist, though not in ways that comfortably align with the usual reading of middle-class modernism (Clarke Working Class Writing, 2018).