Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present sheds new light on literary representations of precarious labor from 1840 until the present. With contributions by experts in American, British, French, German and Swedish culture, this book examines how literature has shaped the understanding of socio-economic precarity, a concept that is mostly used to describe living and working conditions in our contemporary neoliberal and platform economy. This volume shows that authors tried to develop new poetic tools and literary techniques to translate the experience of social regression and insecurity to readers. While some authors critically engage with normative models of work by zooming in on the physical and affective backlash of being a precarious worker, others even find inspiration in their own situations as writers trying to survive. Furthermore, this volume shows that precarity is not an exclusively contemporary phenomenon and that literature has always been a central medium to (critically) register forms of social insecurity. By retrieving parts of that archive, this volume paves the way to a historically nuanced view on contemporary regimes of precarious work.

Michiel Rys is Postdoctoral Researcher of the FWO Flanders at the University of Leuven, Belgium. While his doctoral project unearthed figurations of Maximilien Robespierre in German literature, his current research project focuses on literary representations of precarity, activist literature and the memory culture of the German labor movement (1848-1914).

Bart Philipsen is Full Professor of German literature and theater studies at the University of Leuven, Belgium. His research is situated at the crossroads of literature, politics and philosophy, and is especially focused on the afterlife of idealism and Romanticism. He has published extensively on German literature, politics and theater.

Chapter 1: Introduction. Poetics and Precarity. Literary Representations of Precarious Work, Past and Present.- Chapter 2: Precarity and Privilege in State-of-the-Nation Novels. Anatomy of a Fragmented Body Politic.- Chapter 3: Precarity and Privilege in State-of-the-Nation Novels. Anatomy of a Fragmented Body Politic.- Chapter 4: . Slums, theLumpenproletariat, and Precarity. Literary Representations of the Urban Precarious in Egon Erwin Kisch and Ilija Trojanows Reportages.- Chapter 5: The Impossibility of Protest. Precarity in Maria Leitners Reportage NovelHotel Amerika.-Chapter 6: Precarity, Working-Class Literature, and the Written Presence of Objects. A Material Reading of Lucien BourgeoisLAscension.-Chapter 7: At Home on the Stage. Towards an Affective Geography of Gentrification and Eviction in U.S. Cities.- Chapter 8: Common Language:Academics Against Networking and the Poetics of Precarity.- Chapter 9: Writing the Voices of Precarity in Contemporary French Literature.- Chapter 10: Working Oneself to Death. Interview with Heike Geißler aboutSeasonal Associate (2014).- Chapter 11: The Side-by-Side Existence of Total Catastrophe and Everyday Life Is the Real. Interview with Kathrin Röggla about Precarity and the Grammar of Catastrophes.- Chapter 12: Precarious Authorship in the Digital Society: Literary Value Chains and Kathrin Rögglas Essenpoetik.- Chapter 13: Towards a Poetics of Precarity: Labor Spheres in Contemporary European Fiction.- Chapter 14: The Character of Risk.- Chapter 15: To Be or Not to Be a Laborer: Three Swedish Novels about Young Adults, Temporary Employment and the Precariats Consciousness.- Chapter 16: Neighboring with the Roofless. Imagin(in)g Homeless Others.- Chapter 17: In Real Time: Phenomenologies of Precarity in Ali Smiths Seasonal Quartet.- Chapter 18: Coda. Narrating Precarity in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic.