Abstract

This research examines the representation of class, trauma, and resilience in post-2010 British working-class fiction, a period marked by unprecedented austerity measures implemented by Conservative-led governments. Through comparative textual analysis informed by trauma studies, Marxist class theory, and critical disability studies, the study investigates how contemporary British novelists and filmmakers represent the psychological and material effects of welfare reforms, precarity, and social stigmatization on working-class communities. The analysis reveals that these "austerity fictions" function not merely as social documentation but as counternarratives that contest hegemonic discourses of "scroungers" and the "undeserving poor." By examining works including Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry We Missed You (2019), Niall Griffiths' Broken Ghost (2019), and novels by Ross Raisin and Jenni Fagan, this research demonstrates how contemporary working-class fiction registers trauma at both individual and collective levels while simultaneously imagining forms of resistance and solidarity. Drawing on Thompson's (1963) foundational understanding of class as lived experience, the study concludes that post-2010 British working-class fiction offers crucial insights into the human costs of austerity, the psychological wounds of deindustrialization, and the politics of resilience in an era of neoliberal restructuring.