Modernist industrial novels and industrial sociology. A comparison between Weimar Germany and Post-WWII Italy
Nowoczesne powieści przemysłowe a socjologia przemysłu. Porównanie między weimarskimi Niemcami i Włochami po II wojnie światowej

Summary/Abstract: Since the English Industrial Revolution in the 18th century the industrial novelhas played a significant role in industrialized countries by making workers,politicians, policy makers and the general public aware of actual workingconditions in industry and services. Also, these novels contributed positivelyto workers emancipation. Well-known examples are the industrial novels ofthe English Victorian writers Dickens and Gaskell. Also in other countriesthe industrial novel developed into a well-known literary genre linked withthe process of industrialization. In France Zola’s “naturalist” industrial novelshad a significant influence on labour policies at the time of the ThirdRepublic. After the turn of the 19th century the industrial novel also becamemanifest in other industrialized countries: before World War I in the USA, bythe 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 andjuxtaposing industrial novels written in two important European industrialcountries in two different time periods, Weimar Germany in the 1920s, andpost-war Italy in the 1950s and early 1960s, I will illustrate this.

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