Emer. Prof. Dr. H. Gustav Klaus

Emeritus Professor (Chair of Literature of the British Isles 1994-2009)

Previously taught at the Universities of Warwick, Osnabrück and Bremen.

Visiting appointments held: University of Queensland, University of Edinburgh, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, and University of Aberdeen.

Has also lectured in Austria, Canada, Denmark, France and Spain.

Research areas: plebeian and working-class writing, the 1930s, the literature of the Spanish Civil War, writers on the Left, the utopian tradition, twentieth-century Scottish fiction.

Monographs and Edited Collections

• Marxistische Literaturkritik in England: Das ‘Thirties Movement’ (Neuwied, Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1973)
• Innovationen: Über den Prozeßcharakter von Literatur und Kultur [Writings by Raymond Williams] (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1977); second edn. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983)
• Caudwell im Kontext: Zu einigen repräsentativen Literaturformen der dreißiger Jahre (Frankfurt, Bern: Peter Lang, 1978)
• The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition (Brighton: Harvester Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); paperback edn. (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983); second edn. with new introduction (Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2018)
• The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing (Brighton: Harvester Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985); paperback edn. (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986); second edn. with new introduction (Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2018)
• The Rise of Socialist Fiction 1880-1914 (Brighton: Harvester Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); second edn. with new introduction (Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2018)
• Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries: Working-Class Stories of the 1920s (London; Boulder, Colorado: Journeyman, 1993)
• Strong Words Brave Deeds: The Poetry, Life and Times of Thomas O’Brien (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1994)
• Factory Girl: Ellen Johnston and Working-Class Poetry in Victorian Scotland (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998)
• The Art of Murder: New Essays on Detective Fiction (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998) [edited jointly with Stephen Knight]
• Die Wunde der Geschichte: Aufsätze zur Literatur und Ästhetik (Köln: Böhlau, 1999) [edited jointly with Klaus Garber]
• British Industrial Fictions (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000) [edited jointly with Stephen Knight]
• James Kelman (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2005)
• ‘To Hell with Culture’: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005) [edited jointly with Stephen Knight]
• Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green (Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012) [edited jointly with John Rignall]
• Voices of Anger and Hope: Studies in the Literature of Labour and Socialism (Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2019)

Selected Articles and Essays since 1993

• Cultural Materialism: a Summary of Principles”, in W. John Morgan and Peter Preston eds.,Raymond Williams: Politics, Education, Letters (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 88-104; German translation in Ursula Apitzsch ed., Neurath - Gramsci - Williams: Theorien der Arbeiterkultur und ihre Wirkung (Hamburg: Argument, 1993), 81-98
• “Working Women Writing Verse: A Polemic and a Project”, Gulliver, 34 (1993), 27-41
• “1984 Glasgow”, Etudes Ecossaises, 2 (1994), 31-40; abridged French translation in Liber: Revue internationale des livres, 24 (1995), 12-15; Italian translation L'indice, XIII (February 1996), 43-44; Swedish translation Ord & Bild, 1 (1996), 6-9; Hungarian translation Élet és Irodalom, XI:12 (March 1996), 16-17
• “Hoggart - Williams - Thompson”, IKUS Lectures, 17-18 (1994), 41-49
• “Kelman for Beginners”, Journal of the Short Story in English, 22 (1994), 127-135
• “Black Marxism”, in Wolfgang Fritz Haug ed., Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, vol. 2 (Berlin: Argument, 1995), 257-261
• “The Authorship of the Somhairle Macalastair Ballads”, Irish University Review, XXVI:2 (1996), 107-117
• “Under the Sway of Coal”, New Welsh Review, 36 (1997-8), 29-33
• “Zeitgenössische Literatur aus Schottland in deutscher Übersetzung”, in Winfried Siebers and Uwe Zagratzki eds., Deutsche Schottland-Bilder: Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte (Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 1998), 67-78
• “James Barke”, in Andy Croft ed., A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 7-27
• “Foregrounding the Kitchen: Everyday Domestic Life in Painting and Drama”, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, VI:2 (1999), 137-152
• “Shelagh Delaney” and “Trevor Griffiths”, in Thomas Riggs ed., Contemporary Dramatists, 6th edn. (Detroit, New York: St. James Press, 1999), 138-139, 256-258
• “Mary Collier (1688?-1762)”, Notes and Queries, new series, 47:2 (2000), 201-204; reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, vol. 86 (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 14-17
• “Vorwort” to Stuart Hall, Ideologie Kultur Rassismus: Ausgewählte Schriften 1, 3rd edn. (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 2000), 5-8 [4th edn. 2004]
• “Barry Hines”, in Neil Schlager and Josh Lauer eds., Contemporary Novelists, 7th edn. (Detroit, London: St. James Press, 2001), 460-462
• “Material Grounds: Border and Place in Raymond Williams’s Fiction”, in Juraga Dubravka and M. Keith Booker eds., Socialist Cultures East and West: A Post-Cold War Reassessment (Westport: Praeger, 2002), 123-138
• “Heinemann, Margot Claire (1913-1992)”, in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison eds.,Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 247-249
• “Silhouettes of Anarchism in the Work of Three British Writers: Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley and James Kelman”, in Gisela Hermann-Brennecke and Wolf Kindermann eds., Anglo-American Awareness: Arpeggios in Aesthetics (Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2005), 171-192; reprinted in Twentieth-Century Literature Criticism, vol. 348 (Detroit: Gale, Cengage, 2017), 235-245; German translation in Rainer Barbey und Heribert Tommek eds., Literatur und Anarchie: Das Streben nach Herrschaftsfreiheit in der europäischen Literatur vom 19. bis ins 21. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Synchron Verlag, 2012), 209-228
• “Mrs Rochester and Mr Cooper: Alternative Visions of Class, History and Rebellion in the ‘Hungry Forties’”, Literature & History, Third series, 14:1 (2005), 1-13; reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, vol. 245: British Working-Class Literature (Detroit: Gale Cengage, 2011), 48-54
• “Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries: Working-Class Stories of the 1920s”, Tadeeb International, III:3-4 (2005), 18-32
• “Editorial” for “Britain at War” number of Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 14:1 (2007), 3-7 [edited jointly with Christian Schmitt-Kilb]
• “Genteel Anarchism: Herbert Read’s Poetry of Two Wars”, Literature & History, Third series, 16:1 (2007), 59-76
• “New Light on Ellen Johnston, ‘The Factory Girl’”, Notes and Queries, new series, 55:4 (2008), 430-433
• “Williams and Ecology”, in Monika Seidl et al. eds., About Raymond Williams (London: Routledge, 2010), 141-152; German translation in Roman Horak et al eds., Über Raymond Williams: Annäherungen. Positionen. Ausblicke (Hamburg: Argument, 2017), 148-162
• “Forms of Miners’ Literature in the Nineteenth Century” [reprint of ch. 4 of The Literature of Labour (1985)], in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, vol. 246: British Working-Class Literature (Detroit: Gale Cengage, 2011), 25-37
• “Voices of Anger and Hope from the 1840s to the 1940s: Hugh Williams, T. E. Nicholas and Idris Davies”, Almanac: Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English, 16 (2012), 31-58
• “Kultureller Materialismus I”, in Wolfgang Fritz Haug et al eds., Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, vol. 8/I (Hamburg: Argument, 2012), 350-352
• “John Burnside’s Living Nowhere as Industrial Fiction”, Scottish Literary Review, 5:1 (2013), 111-127; reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 388: Contemporary Scottish Novelists (Detroit: Gale, Cengage, 2016), 35-41
• ‘“Moral Force” and “Physical Force” in the Poetry of Chartism: John Mitchell and David Wright of Aberdeen’, Philological Quarterly, 92:2 (2013), 147-175
• “Remembering Stuart Hall (1932-2014); or, How Cultural Studies Came to Germany: A Personal Memoir”, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 22:1 (2015), 105-114
• “Individual, Community and Conflict in Scottish Working-Class Fiction, 1920-1940”, in Scott Lyall ed., Community in Modern Scottish Literature (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2016), 43-60
• “Bart Kennedy: Hater of Slavery, Tramp and Professor of Walking”, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 60:2 (2017), 167-184
• “On the Road: All Manner of Tramps in English and Scottish Writing from the 1880s to the 1920s”, in John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan eds., A History of British Working Class Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 296-310
• “Afterword: Overdue – The Recovery and Study of Irish Working-Class Writing, an International Perspective”, in Michael Pierse ed., A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 397-405

Note: A fuller list of essays and articles is available in the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium under "Dokumente / Anhang".