Fore instance, the hero is from a working class and another character, in the same novel, is a middle class. I want to study how each character can project his/her class membership.
You could study Topography and General History of Algiers (1612), Marabouts Dialogue, written by a slave and his master, with characters that represent both of them (Amud/ Sosa) and are interchangeable. At times, Sosa tells things only Amud could know, at times Amud let us see his power. A very tricky piece that was vastly misunderstood by French soldiers. https://www.amazon.com/DIALOGUE-MARABOUTS-Miguel-Cervantes-Veneziano-ebook/dp/B0756YRQ89/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1524671655&sr=8-1&keywords=Dialogue+des+Marabouts
For the workers and other classes, an author prolific and innovator is Emile Zola, founder of naturalist novel.
I would rather recommend Gustave Flaubert, notably the hilarious Bouvard and Pecuchet: two Burguese Parisians decide to move to the great unknown, Normandy.
@ Michael Uebel, I didn't knew Beckett wrote a response! Is it how the Normand countrymen see those Parisian? Worst, even, how little town's respectable person see Bouvard and Pecuchet?
I think Zola's novels ('Germinal' -it is about the miners' lives and working conditions- and 'Nana' -the life of a prostitute-, for instance) would suit very well your research.
Eighteenth century and early 1900s like Great Gatsby novels are quite convenient indeed; also Daisy Miller by Henry James.
Another option which is a famous play: Les Misérables.
"Look Back in Anger" By John Osborne is a play which focuses on Angry Young Men's theme. It depicts the agony of working class people after the World Wars.
There are a lot of choices for you in the history of literature. But one thing I would like to mention is that the first recognized novel of the history is based on exactly what you want: Don Quixote.
Plays written by Moliere can also meet your interest.
There is one specific play in French, written by Marivaux, named Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard. It is about two young couple one couple from rich families and the others are both servants. The rich ones disguise as the servants and the servants disguise as their masters. It is funny how they represent the other class. I think you may find what you want in this play.
"Le siècle des Lumières", from Cuban Alejo Carpentier, explains how French Revolution came to the West Indies islands, as the guillotine arrived late in French West Indies after the slavery ban (due to Declaration des droits de l'Homme) was uplifted and slavery re-established. So black people just knew the worst aspect of Revolution (as far Revolution Armies did take no prisoners, they badly needed slaves).
Atefeh Ghafouri I suggest you look for the true origin of Don Quixote, largely inspired on "Poliphili 's dreams" (1496) itself inspired on Euhumerus (6th c. bc) "Incredible stories". What's really new in Don Quixote and fits in the discussion is it's the first novel in the world where a slave claim for a salary: Sancho Panxa. And I'm sorry to confess Moliere plainly copied (Plautus, f.e.: the "Golden Pot" badly transformed as the Misanthrope: Moliere cut off the slave hero, in order not to unplease Louis XIV, author of "Black Code", the Bible for segregationism)
Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape and Jack London's The Iron Heels.
Let me add "Too loud a solitude", great terrible novel from Borumil Hrabal (Czech) , where a writer is forced by government to turn a non-qualified worker in a factory "recycling" forbidden books and decide to save the most he can. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Too_Loud_a_Solitude
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Homecoming by Harold Pinter
The Zoo Story by Edward Albee
Brendan Behan's The Hostage
Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock
Rogers and Hart's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler
Bock and Harnick's Fiddler on the Roof, Fiorello, Tenderloin
Roger Martin du Gard's Les Thibaults
Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbevilles" shows class and social conflict between landed and educated gentry (Angel Clare) and the working class (such as Tess and the other farmhands), between the nouveau riche (like Alec) and the old but now impoverished lineage (Tess's father) in Victorian England, and the families of each of these characters are also symptomatic of their class bearings in social, economic, and cultural contexts. Plus, one simultaneously gets to see, even within rural communities, distinctions between landless peasantry, owners of farms/dairy farms, and the in-between classes of overseers etc.
Similar conflicts are also visible in Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge".
Another interesting example is Tennesseee Williams's play "The Glass Menagerie" where urban lower-middle class aspirations are juxtaposed with old landed families of the American South via the mother (Amanda) and her children (Tom and Laura).
For a very contemporary study, I would suggest Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, which focuses on race (in Nigeria and the US) but also on class distinctions in both sites.
This is beside the main points of the discussion, but I've often wondered why Don Quixote has been considered as the first Western prose novel @Atefeh Ghafouri. The first one could be the 13th cy. Old French prose novel La Mort le Roi Artu, belonging to the Arthurian or Round Table novels. It may nowadays seem in some aspects more like a novel meant for young readers, but it discusses nevertheless universal themes of our civilization like love, friendship, loyalty, courage, death, etc.
In my view "À la recherche du temps perdu" by Marcel Proust is perfect for Your project, where all classes in the society of his time are projected in a very elaborated way.
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; Native Son by Richard Wright; Cannery Row by John Steinbeck; Tom Jones by Henry Fielding; Most of Charles Dickens' novels; The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe; Germinal by Emile Zola; War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. The list goes on and on.
In college I read Arthur Waley's translation of Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en which Waley titled Monkey, A Folk Novel of China and loved it. Curious, I saw that this novel as well as Water Margin early on dealt with authorities and outlaws, and were written in the vernacular. Of the four Classic Novels, three were written before Cervantes wrote Don Quixote de la Mancha. I have read in WIkipedia that most dealt with some sort of consideration of class- the decline of a wealthy family, for example. I hope I can have the time to read this literature.
Most of the plays of Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion for instance, have characters representing different classes and the conflicts that result from them. The Silver Box by Galsworthy is also based on class conflicts. Lady Chatterley's Lover eroticizes this conflict. Hard Times shows class conflict transcended by humanism. Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath are founded on these conflicts. Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Down and Out in Paris and London owe their genesis to class structures.
Of a point de view methodologic, it is relevant to separate between narrations of individuals and narrations of groups, like in Zola. The corpus of the first is colossal, because the most of narrative persons are presented with a social profil or lines of this. To restrict the corpus of study, it will be necessary to restrain the research to one periode or cultural area.
The subject matter of most plays during the 1950s and 1960s was the life and experience of ordinary working class people. Among others, John Osborne, John Arden, and Arnold Wesker all wrote plays that centered around working-class characters.
John Osborne write Look Back in Anger as I recall. Then there was Paddy Chayevsky as well.
It seems that Scottish literature is full of working class writers such as James Kelman; but i couldn't find middle class Scottish writers of the same period; i mean the 1970s, 80s, and 90's Jim Drummond
Abdeledsam Chamkha, try James Robertson’s And The Land Lay Still. I have not read it. Go to a website, TheCultureTrip.com, where Scotlsnd’s alleged top 10 writers are listed with details (Kelman is one if the 10). The James Robertson blurb on thst site led me to suggest it. But others might also serve your jnterest.
Using the App I misspelled your name, Mr. Chamkha, and I cannot edit it from the app. My apologies.
@Abdessalam Chamkha, there so many of such stories in African Literature. One of the most exciting stories in this century so far is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun"
I suggest Willy Russell. Most of his plays fits your inquiry. Some of his notable plays were centered around class antagonism, most obviously in Educating Rita and Blood Brothers
I do work in YA lit, so here are a few:
Legend by Marie Lu
Nought and Crosses by Malorie Blackman
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
Dove Arising by Karen Bao
Killer of Enemies by Joseph Bruchac
The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. Anything by Sinclair Lewis especially Elmer Gantry
I would suggest two plays: Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie", which is a wonderful study in class (especially in terms of mechanical drudgery) , and Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman".
For the romans of one class, with collective protagonist, one specialist was the naturalist adn social writer Emile Zola: peasants, mines men, seamen, even employees of General Stores, etc.
Any literary work could textualize capitalism and class struggle. Many suggested Emil Zola, Charles Dickens, .... They all have these characters, but I also suggest Ian McEwan's Atonement and Saturday.
Because I am not marxist, unless entierely, I prefer speak about "classes´s conflicts", in a perspective more open to the diversity.
since dealing with the class structure and consciousness of mind, i suggest you can go for a theoretical study by looking into john fisk's concept " predominant view"- the view of few {those in power} in society becoming the majority's view and the majority following thw view as such ... the characters setting- cloths language(slang) their mind set being polished by the others in the society
The Hairy Ape and The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill; Homecoming by Harold Pinter; The Ruling Class film starring Peter O’Toole; The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles provides social commentary on many issues prevalent in Victorian society. In particular, Hardy uses Tess’ submission to her parents, Alec d’Urberville, Angel Clare, and society as a whole to examine the sexual double standard prevalent in Victorian society.
Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions constructs an admirable overview of the racial and class biases of Indianapolis, his world in microcosm. He stealthily maps those unmentioned, invisible lines between classes and races and--even better-- makes you laugh, Voltaire style, so as not to cry.
Let's see, many of our US lit candidates are "stealth" because the lit crit establishment here has worked hard post-WW through the 1970s to make "political" literature not "serious" and "profound."
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair give the POVs of the Lithuanian and Polish immigrant workers in the Armour meat packing plant in the early 20th Century. I don't know if the upper classes, Chicago's nouveau elite (whom Theodore Dreiser relentlessly examined) ever appear. But workers, their families, meat plant foremen, local politicians, do appear.
Southern writer Flannery O'Connor took a dim view of humanity from her outsider perspective as a Catholic writer in a largely Protestant south. Her story "Displaced Person" shows how even saving money on an Eastern European post--WWII "DP"farm hand will not fly if said "DP" walks across certain racial norms. (Hope that isn't a spoiler.)
Set in a fictional southern town, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man takes the "outsider" of H. G. Wells who also had class issues and adds racial biases. This novel foregrounds both. Still shocking to read.
One film: Breaking Away, written by Steve Tesich. This film won the best original screenplay Oscar in 1979, I think. Supposedly a "bicycle race film," Breaking Away shows how working class "cutters" the sons of local Bloomington, IN, quarry workers have no future and how they are hemmed in by Indiana University and all its unspoken class hierarchies. Fraternities play a large part in this film. Another interesting plot element is how, in order not to be a "cutter," the protagonist pretends to be Italian. Sorority girls will date Italian international students. Gets around that class barrier.
Theodore Dreiser wrote a chapter in his memoir Dawn about his year at Indiana University Bloomington Campus in the early 1900s. Good to read as a comparison text to the film Breaking Away. See it. At least once, in Breaking Away, there is a trifle of hope. Dreiser views an earlier college social scene, when everything was not yet as crystalized.
Are there some here that are new to any of you? Hope so. As a witty woman who writes hat ads for the Indianapolis Times says in Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, "For prices like these, you can run then through your horses, and spread them on your roses."
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