…to seize this time that comprises her life on Earth at a given period, the time that has coursed through her, the world she has recorded merely by living.
Annie Ernaux, The Years
Generational formation
Reflecting on the political and intellectual experiences of his youth in a New Left Review article published in 2010, Stuart Hall claimed that the New Left in Britain contained people belonging to two distinct political generations whose differences could be understood as being ‘not of age but of formation’. Hall, born in 1932, situated himself as part of a generation for whom 1956 marked a decisive turning point. 1956, he said, was a ‘not a year but a conjuncture’, one that had a lasting political impact on people of his generation. Following the ‘boundary-marking experiences’ of Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’, the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution and the Suez Crisis, socialists and communists lost faith in the Soviet project and came to realise that the independence of some former colonies would not signal the end of imperialism: “they defined for people of my generation the boundaries and limits of the tolerable in politics”. While 1956 was also significant for people on the British left belonging to the generation above Hall’s, more of whom were members of the Communist Party, this group had also been shaped by experiences of the Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War and anti-fascist organising before and during the Second World War and thus represented a distinct tendency. Hall describes these two generations within the New Left as belonging to distinct “political generations, within which the War constituted the symbolic dividing line.”[1]
In his 1928 essay ‘The Problem of Generations’ Karl Mannheim similarly notes that although people of different generations are contemporaries, differences in experience mean that they inhabit “different subjective eras.”[2] He is explicit that generational belonging is about more than shared birth dates. Generation is a historical and social category rather than a biological one: “contemporaneity means a state of being subjected to similar influences rather than a mere chronological datum.”[3] For Mannheim, the cohesiveness of a generation is not only about passively living through key historical events but also involves shared ideas about how history can be shaped: “ A generation as an actuality is constituted when similarly ‘located’ contemporaries participate in a common destiny and in the ideas and concepts which are in some way bound up with its unfolding.”[4] Lewis S. Feuer, in his analysis of twentieth century student movements, The Conflict of Generations (1969), also proposes that key historical events are decisive factors in the formation of what he calls ‘generational consciousness’:
A generation in the sociological sense consists of persons in a common age group who in their formative years have known the same historical experiences, shared the same hopes and disappointments, and experienced a common disillusionment with respect to the elder age groups, toward whom their sense of opposition is defined… Often a generation’s consciousness is shaped by the experience of what we might call the “generational event”. To the Chinese Communist students of the early thirties, for instance, it was the ‘Long March’ with Mao Tse-tung; that was what one writer called their “unifying event”. More than class origin, such an historical experience impresses itself on the consciousness of a student movement.[5]
Pivotal events experienced on the hinge between childhood and adulthood, rather than shared economic conditions or cultural references, can act to unite people across difference according to these analyses. Is Hall’s discussion of ‘political generations’ useful for making sense of experiences of the contemporary conjuncture?
The terms ‘conjuncture’ and ‘generation’ recur across Hall’s writings and offer distinct ways of making sense of historical time. The former describes a confluence of events concentrated into a single moment, while the latter describes a cohort of people moving through time in tandem. If a conjuncture is like an exclamation mark at the end of a dense and significant paragraph, then a generation is more like a collectively authored book. Conjunctures rupture history, generations live through it. Hall, like Mannheim before him, insists that the experiences of people belonging to a single political generation are not defined by their shared period of birth but by their ‘formation’, by the significant historical events that tore through their lives and set them on a different course.
Political generations do not unfold in what Walter Benjamin described as ‘homogeneous empty time’ but are traversed by conjunctures; it is these key moments that shape them and make them meaningful rather than more quotidian or ambient external conditions. Benjamin also identified such moments, writing in ‘The Storyteller’ (1936) of the generation transformed by the First World War:
A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.[6]
To misquote Hegel, most pages in the shared lives of generations are empty; conjunctural moments fill them. But, as Gail Lewis elucidates in her discussion of the importance of intergenerational relationships between activists, the coexistence and interaction of different generations with one another already complicates the concept of conjuncture by introducing multiple temporalities into a single moment in time: “a permanent ‘now’ also erases the particularities of perspective, political methodology and objectives of different generations in a particular conjunctural moment.” [7]
Greg Afinogenov uses the heuristic of generation to make sense of differences between Soviet leaders, most of whom (post war) belonged to the revolutionary generation, as did members of the Politburo and Party elite. As with Hall’s analysis of the British New Left, their uniting experiences come from living through major historical events that shaped their perspectives on the world: Gorbachev, born in 1931, significantly and unlike those who came before him, “ entered adulthood after the most traumatic periods of Soviet history had already passed .”[8] Svetlana Alexievich discusses generational distinctions in a similar manner in the introduction to her collection of oral histories meditating on the collapse of the Soviet Union Second Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets (first published in Russian in 2013 and translated into English in 2016), distinguishing her own generation (born around the time the Second World War ended who grew up in relatively stable times and were still young when perestroika began) from her parents’ generation. An even starker distinction exists, she claims, between those born in the Soviet Union and those born after its collapse: “ it’s like they’re from different planets .”[9] Despite identifying generational differences between Soviet people— differences of age and not formation in that they were shaped by generationally distinct experiences of revolution, war and thaw— she still uses the collective ‘we’ to discuss all Soviet lives, while she claims that a vaster gulf separates those people from the children born after the USSR’s collapse.
Like anything, ‘generation’ is limited as a category for making sense of social relations. Significant differences exist between people who belong to the same generation— Stuart Hall was born a year after Gorbachev and they presumably had very different experiences of historical events like the Soviet invasion of Hungary, for example— but Hall’s analysis of political generations in relation to the conjunctures that shape them grounds the category in the specific convulsions of history.
Internal fault-lines
Class divisions exist within and not only between generations but it would nonetheless be misleading to claim that generational differences have no impact on class relations. In The Asset Economy: Property Ownership and the New Logic of Inequality (2020), Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings discuss popular discourse that focuses on generation as a newly significant heuristic for making sense of people’s economic position. They cite a piece published in The Economist in 2019 that coined the term ‘millennial socialism’, which anxiously discussed the emergence of a cohort of young people drawn to left-wing ideas because their economic prospects are so much worse than those of their parents. While this kind of analysis has become more and more prevalent in the mainstream press, the authors of The Asset Economy note that social scientists have generally come to reject the idea that simply being born around the same time as other people actually leads to much commonality of experience, emphasising structural inequalities instead.
The Asset Economy proposes taking a position somewhere in between these two poles. They maintain that generation does play a more significant role in people’s economic lives today in a world where wages and employment determines economic position less than the capacity to buy assets. Inequality does not disappear and certainly does not only exist between people belonging to different generations but it works differently in the present than it did in the past because the relative class positions of people within the same generation is now much more tied to people of the previous generation than it was before. If class mobility was the dream of a previous generation, now class divisions are more entrenched and tied to the existing class relations of the past. Inequalities are not only reproduced across generations but exacerbated because of how assets and inheritance work:
the generational aspect is important not because it produces a uniform experience of social life or a clean divide between different generations… but precisely because it is where the economic fault-lines that four decades of neoliberal fiscal and financial policies have produced are becoming visible… What we are seeing in the present era is the growing importance of intergenerational transfer and inheritance for the determination of life chances.[10]
It is not that there is just a fault-line between boomers and millennials, there is also an internal fault-line between millennials: between those who do and those who don’t benefit from wealth transfer from the boomer generation: “ intergenerational transfers have become a key mechanism in the new logic of class.” [11] The authors thus propose conceptualising class today not in terms of work and education but in terms of relationships to assets (and they also acknowledge that class differences also exist between asset holders— a person who owns a property with a mortgage is different from one who owns a property outright, for example, who is different from someone who owns multiple properties that they rent out etc etc). They point out that there is something weird about the temporal logic of the asset economy that has implications for how it is possible to imagine life cycles playing out; it’s not just a neat chronology but produces strange temporal glitches:
The notion of the life course suggests an ordered sequence of irreversible life stages that was attuned to the organization of life in the post-war era. But the suspensions, delays, deferrals and discontinuities characteristic of asset-based lives mean that they are often not lived as a sequence of chronologically ordered events.[12]
Hall insisted that the uniting features of generational experience should be understood in relation to shared historical experiences, whereas Adkins, Cooper and Konings suggest that divisions between people of a single generation should be understood in terms of their relation to people belonging to the generation before them. A conjunctural moment rips through the flow of time whereas inheritance accumulates across time, uniting people not with their peers but with their parents and grandparents. As Melinda Cooper argues in her 2017 book Family Values, this economic “phenomenon also and inevitably entails the reassertion of the private family as a critical economic institution and a portal to social legitimacy;” the asset economy inserts the vertical relationships of the nuclear family into horizontal relationships between peers.[13] Both The Asset Economy‘s and Hall’s accounts of generation are in some sense material; neither proposes that generations move smoothly, uniformly or equally through time but the visions of unity and disunity they envision are very different.
Ensembles of social relations
In the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ Marx describes ‘human essence’ as an “ ensemble of social relations” . Individuals are not abstract entities but are shaped by particular historical circumstances. Unlike the image of a life interrupted by a conjuncture, which emphasises the formative significance of ruptural moments, this understanding of subjectivity is more concerned with on-going and enveloping historical forces. Is it possible to think in generational terms in relation to historical experiences and shifts that do not play in the major key of conjunctural events but instead unfold in a quieter, more quotidian register?
Helen Charman’s 2024 book Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood opens with an autobiographical introduction in which she situates her own childhood experiences of being mothered within the context of the history of the British welfare state. Without treating her particular experiences as somehow general or exemplary, she nonetheless demonstrates how her childhood was socially and historically shaped. The inextricability of individual lives from broader social conditions is precisely why motherhood, as Charman argues, is always political.
Born in 1993, Charman was raised by a single mother who, in addition to the unwaged labour of mothering, worked for the NHS performing waged care work. Charman reflects that “ the third party in my relationship with my mother has always been the welfare state .” Although her book goes on to describe how experiences of mothering and being mothered have been impacted by the violence and austerity of the British welfare state under both Conservative and Labour governments since the Second World War, she recalls that as a child her conception of the state was ‘rose-tinted’, “ intertwined with my deeply felt perception of myself as a New Labour baby, the child of a holistic social contract that was already well on its way out by the time I was born in 1993. We lived within a fantasy of the post-war commitment to nurture.” [14] Charman acknowledges a gap between her idealised image of the bounteous state and the more threadbare reality.
Charman invokes the work of social historian Carolyn Steedman whose Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (1986) situates her life and the life of her mother in the context of twentieth century British social history. Unlike the conjunctural analysis proposed by Hall, in which generational experience is defined by its punctuation by major historical events, Steedman is more interested in the on-going routines, rhythms and textures of everyday life. In telling the story of her working class mother’s journey from a Lancashire mill town to South London, from an upbringing in which she was surrounded by “ the articulated politics of class-consciousness” to an adulthood as an envious and aspirational working class Tory, Steedman is clear that material conditions have deep and complex psychic effects: she is attentive to questions of work, wages, and housing but also to questions of fantasy, desire and ‘longing’. What does it mean to treat something as ephemeral-seeming as her mother’s desire for a New Look coat as a serious historical phenomenon? Like Charman’s distinction between her childhood fantasy of the welfare state and its reality, Steedman is interested in the gap between concrete experience and the kinds of stories people tell themselves, which also participate in forming generational consciousness.
Steedman not only traces her mother’s life but also charts her own childhood growing up in South London in the 1950s, supplementing her personal memories with social history, seeking to “ explain an individual life lived in historical time .”[15] The stark intergenerational difference between Steedman and her mother is not understood to come from the fact that only one of them lived through the Second World War but in relation to shifts in the British welfare state that took place in its wake. Charman cites a passage from near the end of the book in which Steedman describes how the post-war welfare state nurtured her both physically and psychically:
I think I would be a very different person now if orange juice and milk and dinners at school hadn’t told me, in a covert way, that I had a right to exist, was worth something. My inheritance from those years is the belief (maintained always with some difficulty) that I do have a right to the earth. I think that had I grown up with my parents only twenty years before, I would not now believe this…[16]
Steedman acknowledges the persistence of inequalities between people of her generation and notes some of the limits to the state’s provisions, but gives an overwhelmingly glowing account, stressing how these interventions marked a sharp break between the experiences of her generation and the one before:
It was a considerable achievement for a society to pour so much milk and so much orange juice, so many vitamins, down the throats of its children, and for the height and weight of those children to outstrip the measurements of only a decade before… more children were provided with the goods of the earth than any generation before. What my mother lacked, I was given; and though vast inequalities remained between me and others of my generation, the sense that a benevolent state bestowed on me, that of my own existence and the worth of that existence– attenuated, but still there — demonstrates in some degree what a fully material culture might offer in terms of physical comfort and the structures of care and affection that it symbolizes, to all its children.[17]
Here Steedman did not rely on personal financial inheritance from an older generation but the nurture of the state nourished her body and psyche in ways that she carried with her through time alongside other members of her generation. Echoing these sentiments another twenty years later, the Acknowledgements to her 2009 book Labour’s Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England diverge from the conventions of the genre and open not by expressing thanks to her employers, colleagues, friends or partners but instead by thanking the British state:
A therapist might say that I have a good relationship with the state, in the way that relationships with parents, employers, and other forms of authority are described as being ‘good’. This would mean that I do not experience the relationship as onerous, or oppressive; that I have a cheerful-seeming, passive, and somewhat childlike acceptance of its place in my life and consciousness. (A psychoanalyst on the other hand, might well make me plumb the depths of my desire to express self-identity in such terms. I am, by the way, entirely with the psychoanalyst here, not the therapist.) The state gave me good teeth and strong bones (National Health orange juice, school milk, many jars of Virol); the state taught me to read, got me away from home and sent me to university. In the shape of the then Social Science Research Council, the state funded my PhD and made me a historian. It is in me; the state is imprinted on me; I carry it with me, as a person it has made me.[18]
Steedman suggests here that a psychoanalyst might credibly question her positive attachment to the British state. In this passage she seems to both reaffirm and undermine her own sense of its ‘goodness’, though questioning her moral evaluation of the state does not necessarily contradict the claim that it ‘made’ her. Would people born in Britain in subsequent generations similarly be able to claim that the state is in them? What are the political implications of such a claim? And what of the psychic impacts of organis ed state abandonment?
Tearing through
These fragmentary musings on generations and conjunctures were prompted by the call for articles issued for this revival issue of Variant. The magazine was originally founded in 1984 and existed (with a short break in the mid-90s) until 2012. The magazine is a year younger than me and so I immediately found myself mapping these dates of its existence onto my own life and thought about its passage through time in relation to historical time. How have shifts in the welfare state (in terms of education, arts funding, housing, benefits etc) and major ‘conjunctural’ events (the 1984– 85 Miners’ Strike; poll tax riots; Tony Blair’s election victory; the invasion of Iraq; the 2008 financial crisis; the student, anti-austerity movements and riots of 2010– 11; IndyRef; Brexit; COVID-19) that took place between 1984 and the present impacted the political formation of people of different generations? I didn’t know much about the magazine, but I did know that it had received state funding and I presumed that the magazine stopped publication as a result of that funding being cut. This is confirmed by a statement on the magazine’s website from July 2012:
It is unfortunate that we have to inform you that Variant has been ‘unsuccessful’ in our funding application to Creative Scotland. As a result Variant for the first time since 1996, when Variant was relaunched as a free newsprint and online publication, is in the position of having to suspend publication.[19]
Indeed, in the years before this final cut Variant had received the same amount in annual funding from the Scottish Arts Council and later Creative Scotland for a long time; as prices rose the number of issues it was possible to produce per year gradually reduced. The back cover of the last issue, published in spring 2012, is from the Occupied Times and features a weirdly detourned faceless David Cameron above the word ‘OCCUPY’.
In a short blog post on Edinburgh Review and other small Scottish magazines in the 1980s, Jenny Turner describes the lively publishing scene in which she participated, alongside many others including Malcolm Dickson who edited volume one of Variant and who had been involved in the Free University of Glasgow. It is not an especially nostalgic piece and she reflects on how male-dominated those scenes were at that time (despite her own formative creative and intellectual relationships with women). She also reflects on the broader material conditions that enabled her and her peers to write and publish. Although Peter Kravitz and Murdo Macdonald, who edited Edinburgh Review, were privately educated and came from relatively wealthy backgrounds, it was also possible for someone like Turner, who did not share their class position, to survive as a writer at that time. In the 1980s Turner was paid £50 to write for Edinburgh Review, which she donated to the Ethiopia famine relief fund. She recalls feeling uncomfortable receiving money for writing and reflects on the economic conditions that enabled her to give the money she made from writing away and why she later changed her mind and started saving:
It may have had to do with claiming dole at the time and also housing benefit. For a couple of years I also had Scottish Education Department grants. I don’t remember how much I got for subsequent Edinburgh Review pieces, though presumably it was about the same. I do remember that after that first splurge with charity, I started keeping the money to myself. The government’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme gave you £40 a week for a year if you put up £1,000 of savings, so I did that and set myself up as a journalist.[20]
She not only describes the institutional support that enabled small publications to survive (though never adequately nor without a great deal of additional unpaid labour) but she also makes clear how the state made it possible for her and her peers to work as writers and editors via benefits and other schemes. Turner is well aware that her own class mobility and status as a property owner was only possible because she was born at a particular moment in British history: “ I do think: historical forces, how they tear through people, how they’ve flung me up, at least for the moment, and what burdens they are dumping on the young ”’[21] The various forms of state support Turner lists that enabled her to pursue a career as a writer without access to inherited wealth is conjunctural in a very different sense than the kinds of dramatic, epoch-making events of 1956 cited by Hall but she articulates how crucial such factors also are in the formation of generational experience.
Sometimes reading about these kinds of generational differences it is tempting to fall into the kind of misty-eyed attitude to state provision that Steedman displays in her work. I remember reading the socialist historian and feminist Sheila Rowbotham’s autobiography and realising that she and I had lived on the same street in Hackney a few decades apart and thinking with longing and furious jealousy how differently it would have been if I could have done what she had done: bought a house there very cheaply and let lots of people live in it while pursuing their creative, intellectual and political projects alongside bits and pieces of teaching in now non-existent adult education institutions. My parents met as youth and social workers in the late 1970s in Middlesbrough and the world of funded educational training, social housing, law centres, rape crisis centres, homeless shelters, adventure playgrounds, women’s centres, claimants unions, and soup kitchens they describe from that time sounds like a different world, though obviously when they were living through it things didn’t seem remotely rosy. It’s a measure of how bad things are today that the insufficient crumbs of social democracy can now seem so utopian. Reading the London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group’s 1979 pamphlet In and Against the State is instructive in this regard. All state workers of various kinds at the dawn of the Thatcher era— again, in sectors that have since been drastically cut or where working conditions and wages have significantly deteriorated— the authors are clear about the state’s limits and violence:
Resources we need involve us in relations we don’t. The major contradiction that seems to arise over and over again in peoples’ relation with the state is that the state’s institutions offer certain needed goods, benefits or services–things we cannot do without, or would rather have from the state than from any ready alternative source; yet getting these things somehow puts us in an undesirable position.[22]
This undesirability they identify grasps that the state is not the straightforwardly beneficent parent of Steedman’s imagination. As I write, Keir Starmer’s Labour government is threatening to drastically cut disability benefits and has refused to lift the two-child benefit cap while it increases defense spending, continues to sell arms to Israel in the midst of its genocidal onslaught on Gaza, and has enthusiastically embraced transphobic and anti-migrant rhetoric and policies while cracking down on protest. The imperative at this conjuncture then seems to demand something even more contradictory: to fight for and against the state.
Inheriting ruins
In a 2022 review essay published in the London Review of Books, Turner, a generation younger than Stuart Hall, recalls first encountering his work in the late 1980s and finding it weirdly detached from Britain’s economic, cultural and political realities at the beginning of the so-called ‘end of history’: “ why was he writing like he’d forgotten the terrible things that had just happened? What was he missing about the world as it really was?” [23] She cites Ambavalaner Sivanandan’s biting and vituperative critique of Hall’s ‘New Times’ project that accused him of abandoning serious economic and political analysis in favour of wishy- washy platitudes. She also cites Hall’s ‘Gramsci and Us’ in which he wrote:
When a conjuncture unrolls, there is no ‘ going back’ . History shifts gears. The terrain changes. You are in a new moment. You have to attend, ‘ violently , with all the ‘ pessimism of the intellect’ at your command, to the ‘ discipline of the conjuncture’ .
Turner suggests that by the time the 1989 conjuncture unrolled Hall wasn’t able to attend to it with sufficient violence.
David Scott conducted a series of interviews with Caribbean intellectuals (including Hall) for the magazine Small Axe over many years and in his essay ‘The Temporality of Generations: Dialogue, Tradition, Criticism’ (2014) he reflects on how these intergenerational dialogues were motivated by a desire to “ assuage an inchoate sense of temporal unease” that he names as generational.[24] As someone belonging to a younger generation than his interviewees, he became conscious not only that he had been born into a less radical, post-independence historical moment but that the people he was interviewing seemed unable “ to define the present in a critical idiom that captures the distinctiveness of the prevailing social-political malaise, the new problem-space, that can shelter the capacity to evoke directions of possible alternatives, or at least that enables imagined futures to be invested not only with hope and desire and longing but also with conceptual traction and political will.” [25] Though sitting together in the same room at the same moment in history, Scott and his interviewees were not strictly contemporaries because their experiences of history and time were so different. Scott’s generation has inherited the hopeful anti-imperialist and socialist visions of the previous generation as a ruin, whereas his interlocutors could still remember experiencing those same visions as an ‘anticipated horizon’.[26] The interviews function to transmit the past to the present and sustain a radical tradition. The implication of Scott’s argument, however, seems to be not that the political visions of older generations can be reignited in the present but that new horizons can only be glimpsed by those who were formed in and by the ruins of the old ones.
Thanks to the editors for helpful feedback, to Sam Dolbear for our many conversations about generations and intergenerational friendship, to Chris Law who sent me the Jenny Turner piece about small magazines, and to Fearghus Roulston who told me about the David Scott article.
Stuart Hall, ‘Life and Times of the New Left’, New Left Review, Jan/Feb 2010. ↑
Karl Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’ in Paul Kecskemeti ed., Karl Mannheim: Essays (London: Routledge, 1952, 1972), 276-322, p. 283. ↑
Mannheim, p. 282. ↑
Mannheim, p. 306. ↑
Lewis S Feuer, The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student Movements (London: Heinemann, 1969), p. 25. ↑
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland and others, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press: 2002), 143-166, p. 144. ↑
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/whose-movement-is-it-anyway ↑
Greg Afinogenov, ‘Kids Those Days: Mikhail Gorbachev and His Generation’ https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/kids-those-days/ ↑
Svetlana Alexievich, Second-Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016), ↑
Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings, The Asset Economy Property Ownership and the New Logic of Inequality (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), p. 6 ↑
Adkins et al, p. 10. ↑
Adkins et al, p. 69. ↑
Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone, 2017) p. 123. ↑
Helen Charman, Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood (London: Penguin, 2024), p. xi. ↑
Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, p. 8. ↑
Steedman, Landscape, p. 122. ↑
Steedman, Landscape, p. 122-123. ↑
Carolyn Steedman, Labour’s Lost, p. ↑
https://www.variant.org.uk/issue43.html ↑
https://campuspress.stir.ac.uk/scotmagsnet/2021/05/17/mag-memories-jenny-turner/ ↑
https://campuspress.stir.ac.uk/scotmagsnet/2021/05/17/mag-memories-jenny-turner/ ↑
In and Against the State ↑
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n21/jenny-turner/a-difficult-space-to-live ↑
David Scott, ‘The Temporality of Generations: Dialogue, Tradition, Criticism’, New Literary History, 45, 2 (2014), p. 158. ↑
Scott, p. 158. ↑
Scott, p. 167. ↑