Pat Barker, Life Class

Jessica Gildersleeve (University of Southern Queensland)

Ed. by Cristina Sandru, The Literary Encyclopedia
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kerry Myler (Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2007

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Pat Barker’s most recent novel, Life Class (2007), is in many ways a neat culmination of her current body of work. The novel returns to the Great War, the site of Barker’s greatest commercial success, the Regeneration trilogy (1991-95), but it also picks up the concern of her early work with twentieth-century working-class life and the struggles of gender and sexuality; perhaps most powerfully, it engages with and develops her later ideas about the role of art and of the artist in the face of trauma, and in particular, war. This juxtaposition of art and war may be seen to form the crux of her latest novel. The life class of Barker’s text is not only a site for the study of the human body, but of the human …

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2188 words

Citation: Gildersleeve, Jessica. "Life Class". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 April 2008 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23014, accessed 22 November 2024.]

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