Modernist industrial novels and industrial sociology. A comparison between Weimar Germany and Post-WWII Italy

Abstract

_{Since the English Industrial Revolution in the 18th century the industrial novel has played a significant role in industrialized countries by making workers, politicians, policy makers and the general public aware of actual working conditions in industry and services. Also, these novels contributed positively to workers emancipation. Well-known examples are the industrial novels of the English Victorian writers Dickens and Gaskell. Also in other countries the industrial novel developed into a well-known literary genre linked with the process of industrialization. In France Zola’s “naturalist” industrial novels had a significant influence on labour policies at the time of the Third Republic. After the turn of the 19th century the industrial novel also became manifest in other industrialized countries: before World War I in the USA, by the Inter-bellum in Germany and the USSR, and after World War II in Italy. Often these novels were based on desk research or empirical research on-site. Therefore, these novels are also expressions of pseudo- or ex-ante sociology, regretfully underestimated in vested industrial sociology. By comparing and juxtaposing industrial novels written in two important European industrial countries in two different time periods, Weimar Germany in the 1920s, and post-war Italy in the 1950s and early 1960s, I will illustrate this.}