The ambitious aim of this book is to explore “the ways in which labour was experienced, imagined and represented in the years between 1890 and 1930” (1). This is a large brief that inevitably requires considerable delimiting of the potentially vast range of material and possible avenues of exploration. For example, the theme of “labour” could include all labor (intellectual, artistic, professional, skilled, and unskilled) or just the more conventionally tagged “labour” of the working classes. The link between labor and selfhood implies a bias toward factual and fictional life writing, while the key word “modernism” suggests that all categories and definitions will be up for grabs and in a state of theoretical and actual transition. Moreover, this type of study is inevitably a form of historical and cultural survey that requires a historicist framework to impose coherence on a period of rapid transformation. Morag Shiach's approach to these methodological questions is to range widely over philosophical and cultural debates about the meaning and purpose of labor and to apply the concepts and ideas that emerge from these debates to a variety of literary and visual representations of labor.

There are three leading ideas: alienation, modernization, and identity. Shiach's thesis is that the modernist period challenged the post-Romantic construction of labor (primarily, working-class labor) as degrading, dehumanizing, and depersonalizing. The influential theories of Marx, Morris, and Nietzsche, who in their different ways saw industrialism as an alienating mode of production, gave way to new ideas of the emancipating effects of labor. There are two trajectories for this narrative of liberation: the emancipation of women, represented in the book by a chapter on the new technologies of the typewriter and the washing machine, and another chapter on the writings and watercolors of Sylvia Pankhurst; and the struggle of the industrial working class against the new practice of Taylorism (or “scientific management”) and the postwar depression, a struggle that climaxed in the General Strike of 1926, the topic of another chapter. The discussion of tropes of female labor and the suffragette movement is full of original research and insights, though the choice of new “feminine” technologies (typewriter and washing machine) begs the question about other distinctively modern inventions and social innovations that left impressions on the world of work and identity, for example, showers (see Beatrix Campbell's essay “Baths and Bosses,” in Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the Eighties [London, 1984]), Fordism and the production line (factory work features only marginally in the book), the motor car (picked out by F. R. Leavis as the emblem of mass culture in his 1930 polemic “Mass Civilization, Minority Culture”), or the shopworker (again, overlooked in this study, but a theme that has attracted considerable scholarly attention since the publication of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project). This is not to cavil at the excellence of Shiach's subtle and sophisticated readings of interconnected political, philosophical, and cultural texts but to make the point that some of the large claims made for her chosen themes may need some further contextualization and qualification.

The driving force of modernist aesthetics sometimes produces a strained interpretive outcome. For example, in the hands of modernist critics the typewriter is transformed into a machine that is “metaphorically encapsulating the experience of the modern … staging language as process, as structure, and as in a distant and contested relation to itself ” (61). This is a fascinating thesis, but there is precious little evidence that real women's lives responded to this bracing fracturing of the old stable ego, and even the modernist and protomodernist literary texts adduced by Shiach only show this process as negative and destructive—indeed, there is a pervasive streak of antifeminism in the cited texts from Joyce, Eliot, and Lawrence, which Shiach is somewhat reluctant to acknowledge. Eliot's lower-class typist in The Waste Land is a figure of alienation and devitalization who “makes a welcome of indifference.” Lawrence berated “cocksure” women who produced “votes, or miles of typewriting, years of business efficiency” (75). In fact the end result of putting the issue of work through the modernist aesthetic mill seems to be almost uniformly negative—though they may explore and enlighten the murky depths of identity formation and human behavior, modernist texts cannot deliver a credible vision of a world beyond the alienation and entrapment of labor. While this may be precisely the point of modernism's radical complexity and disinterested realism, it could be argued that there is actually more collective and personal utopianism to be found in William Morris's Romantic Marxism than can be located in Shiach's modernist innovations: Lawrencian Nietzscheanism (which is given a whole chapter), the transformative materialism and Bergsonian “duration” of the typewriter, or the Sorelian transcendentalism of the General Strike.

Any book that positions working-class writing and working-class history within a complex and sophisticated cultural perspective is to be welcomed. The chapter on the General Strike of 1926 is a particularly valuable addition to a limited body of critical work on a neglected topic. But I would like to make a plug here for one text that Shiach omits from her survey: Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914). Surely any study of literature and labor in the Edwardian period—and Shiach claims that “The Edwardians are, indeed, at the heart of this study” (3)—could have given some space to Tressell's unique depiction of socialism and the workplace. Indeed, Tressell would have fitted neatly into the discussion of the typewriter as a transformative cultural force, as one of the reasons he could not find a publisher was that he could not afford to have his substantial manuscript typed. But then we may have been deprived of the Benjaminesque “aura” of his manuscript.

The disjunctive relations between the technology and aesthetics of “mechanical reproduction” remains a fertile topic for study in our postmodern era of instant knowledge, the personal computer, and the Internet. It is to be hoped that Shiach's book will find its successors.