Proletarian Literature

The proletariat are citizen of the lowest class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian. Proletarian literature refers to the literature created by working-class writers mainly for the class-conscious proletariat, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica states, that because it "is essentially an intended device of revolution", is therefore often published by the Communist party or left wing sympathizers. But the proletarian novel has also been categorized without any emphasis on revolution, as a novel "about the working classes and working-class life; perhaps with the intention of making propaganda", and this may reflect a difference between Russian, American and other traditions of working-class writing, with that of Britain. The British tradition was not solely inspired by the Communist party, as it also involved socialists and anarchists. Furthermore, writing about the British working class writers, H Gustav Klaus, in The Socialist Novel: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition, as long ago as 1982, suggested that "the once current 'proletarian' is, internationally, on the retreat, while the competing concepts of 'working class' and 'socialist' continue to command about equal adherence". The word proletarian is also sometimes used to describe works about the working class by actual working class authors, to distinguish them from works by middle class authors, like Charles Dickens's Hard Times and Henry Green's Living.

The avantgardist Proletkult of the first years of the Russian Revolution, was different from the later, traditional and realist Proletarian novel of the Stalin years. It flourished in Russia, in an effort to encourage literacy.