Lediggangens spøgelse

Abstract

The article traces the emotional history of unemployment through various analyses of British and American fiction: Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Allan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (1994). The article develops a concept of a specific literary form (the unemployment novel) and a parallel set of emotional norms (the genre of unemployment), which it defines as the constellation of feelings connected to unemployment.