Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality By David Waterman

Chapter 1

Caging or Community?

The “Working Class” Novels

—Salman Rushdie

Academics, literary critics, and the general reading public often pigeonhole writers, depending on where they fit among others within the larger landscape of English literature—or more precisely, literature in English—in spite of Salman Rushdie's chiding in Imaginary Homelands (61) that such classification may well be counterproductive. We do it out of habit, to save time, to communicate with one another more easily. Before Pat Barker became a “war” writer, she was labeled a “feminist,” “regional,” “realist,” and “working-class” novelist on the basis of her first three works: Union Street (1982), Blow Your House Down (1984) and The Century's Daughter (1986) (later known as Liza's England). Mention is always made of Barker's own working-class origins, and while such biographical detail is often interesting and sometimes important, we should also be wary of the potential shortcomings in the