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A lot of people have asked for a definition of 'working-class literature' and, not having much time for Twitter recently, I've been putting it off. Will have a go now…
The easy answer would be: literature by working-class people. Easy! However, even this is more complicated than it seems: is it the author's class that matters? Their subject matter? Their politics?
Even if you decide it's the author's class that matters, issue remains how to define it: Sillitoe may be a working-class writer when he publishes Sat Night & Sun Morning, but is that still the case by the time of The Open Door and he's been a professional author for 30 years? 
Author Tim Lott touches on this in his article in The Guardian: "I am no longer working class... I have little idea what life in the poorer parts of England is like any more, other than what I can glean from documentaries such as Benefits Street." theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Not to mention diff definitions of class: a teacher may be working class in that they work for a wage but middle class in access to resources of education, culture etc. That said, a similar inequality of access can be said to have existed between working-class kids pre & post WW2
Given these problems, I tend towards an expansive and inclusive definition of working-class writing as anything around a focus on work (paid or domestic) and/or accurate (tho not necessarily 'realistic') representations of working-class life, culture and resistance to power.
Perhaps another way of thinking about working-class literature is as 'literature that is relevant to the working-class movement'. Zola, Kafka, Lawrence, Orwell, Brierley & Braine can thus all be included, despite differences in background and/or politics
Denning offers a diff way to look at it: "Too often critics begin with the same question: Does one define proletarian literature by author, audience, subject matter, or politics? Is it literature by workers, for workers, or about workers? Or is it simply revolutionary literature?
For Denning, these all fail because "they treat genres as abstract & ahistorical ideal types" rather than institutions born out of particular social formations: rather than ask "what is proletarian literature?" we should ask "what are proletarian literary formations?"
You may have noticed something about the authors mentioned in this thread: they are, to a man (literally), white and male. This is no accident, but rather to point out another issue about who usually gets included under the banner of 'working-class literature'.
Writers like George Lamming, Toni Morrison and Jeanette Winterson all came from working-class backgrounds. Yet they are perceived as postcolonial, black, feminist or LGBT authors but rarely (if ever) as working-class ones.
Meanwhile, Djuna Barnes is no more middle class than, say, Orwell (far less, probably) and her novel, Nightwood (like Down & Out in Paris & London), is set within the interwar Parisian slums. But Nightwood is an LGBT novel; it's not allowed to also be a working class one
This actually speaks to a wider problem in how working-class politics are often conceived: anti-racism, women's & LGBT liberation are 'identity politics' distracting from 'real' politics of working-class unity, forgetting (ignoring?) working-class anti-racism, women's & LGBT lib
Equally, working-class organisations have historically too often thought of their main constituencies as (white) male breadwinners, leading them to support anti-immigration policies, colour bars, equal pay for women, etc
So the debate about who 'counts' as working-class literature is, in the final instance, also about who 'counts' in working-class politics. The stakes, then, could not be higher.
There is another author who represents a different sort of problem for working-class writing: BS Johnson. Himself from a working-class background, and white and male and a vocal trade union supporter, yet rarely considered 'working-class literature'.
His exclusion seems due to something else: too experimental. Working-class literature can be a sub-category of literature but it also has to be a sub-category of realist literature whether by shoehorning it in there, ignoring its avant-gardism, or by ignoring its class politics
Fredric Jameson, arguably the most famous living Marxist literary scholar, says this himself when he describes "the proletarian novel" as "a curious subform of realism" and so ignores all the proletarian novels which move away from realism
But "proletarian novels" often engaged with avant-gardism eg 1930s writers like James Hanley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, James Barke and John Sommerfield all drawing on modernism for inspiration
Meanwhile, BS Johnson, though both working class and a writer, is rarely thought of as a 'working-class writer'. Yet his work often expressed left-wing views, emphasised workers' alienation from their labour and class conflict
Johnson's avant-gardism is one reason for this, another being that he depicts white-collar Londoners rather than blue-collar workers from Britain's industrial heartlands. In both aesthetics & subject matter he resists stereotypes of what working-class life and writing looks like
What this (long) thread is trying to get at is a view of working-class writing beyond narrow definitions confined to specific periods/places or purely sociological definitions of class, but rather a class literature defined by an antagonism with class society
As Italian Marxist Mario Tronti argued, "What the working class is cannot be separated from how it struggles." This project would argue that similar could be said of working-class literature.
