• Work in Literature
• Agathon
• Aristophanes
• Blanchot
• Dio Chrysostom
• Euripides
• Gauny
• Goethe
• Hesiod
• Iain Banks
• Iliad
• Jünger
• Le Guin
• Linhart
• Looking Backward
• Man who was Thursday
• News from Nowhere
• Odyssey
• Plutarch
• Romulus, My Father
• Satire of the Trades
• Slave Narratives
• Soul of Man under Socialism
• Strugatsky Brothers
• Thoreau
• Toilers of the Sea
• Utopian / Dystopian Literature
• Virginia Woolf
• Wells
• Worker Writings
• Works and Days (Hesiod)

References for Theme: Work in Literature

• Allmendinger, Blake
• The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture (1992)

• Barthas, Louis
• "Poilu" (1978)

• Blanchot, Maurice
• Thomas the Obscure (1988)

  (p.108) What strange light is this which falls upon me? Could the effort to expel my­self from every created thing have made of me the supreme creator? Having stretched all my strength against being, I find myself again at the heart of creation. Myself, working against the act of creating, I have made myself the creator.

• Bromell, Nicholas K
• By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (1993)

• Cavazzini, Andrea
• "Le travail et ses spectres. Un parcours archéologique" (2017)

• Christie, James William
• "“Days of begging, days of theft”: The Philosophy of Work in Blood Meridian" (2016)

• Dowd, Michelle M
• Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2009)

• Erbeznik, Elizabeth
• "Workers and Wives as Legible Types in Eugène Sue's" Les Mystères de Paris"" (2013)

• Hapke, Laura
• Tales of the working girl: wage-earning women in American literature, 1890-1925 (1992)

• Johnson, Claudia Durst
• Labor and Workplace Issues in Literature (2006)

• Karanika, Andromache
• Voices at Work: Women, Performance, and Labor in Ancient Greece (2014)

• Knapp, James F
• Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work (1988)

• Langland, William
• Piers the Ploughman (2006)

• Louttit, Chris
• Dickens's secular gospel: work, gender, and personality (2009)

• Nealon, Jeffrey T
• "Work of the Detective, Work of the Writer: Paul Auster's City of Glass" (1996)

  (p.97) Why does the writer find it so hard to make his or her literary work pass into the realm of metaphysical work? As Maurice Blanchot notes, “If we see work as the force of history, the force that transforms man while it transforms the world, then a writer’s activity must be recognized as the highest form of work” (Gaze 33). Blanchot here follows a scrupulous philosophical analysis of work. He uses the example of a stove: if a person wants to get warm, she builds a stove; she negates merely disparate elements by casting them together in a higher unity....

• "Work of the Detective, Work of the Writer: Paul Auster's City of Glass" (1996)

  (p.98) Blanchot here gives a concise summary of the work of dialectic, which negates in order to bring elements into a higher transformation or synthesis within the teleological economy of history. The idea of heat is realized in the work that builds the stove; the end product of heat is brought about and mastered in the negation of the disconnected elements—steel, rivets, pipe, rock, cement—that form the final unity of the usable stove. In turn, the stove’s heat provides the conditions for further transformations—allows other ideas to be mastered, allows other ends to be attained, allows history to progress. For Blanchot,...

• "Work of the Detective, Work of the Writer: Paul Auster's City of Glass" (1996)

• Parker, Martin
• "Critical Representations of Work and Organization in Popular Culture - By Carl Rhodes and Robert Westwood" (2009)

• Rivers, Bronwyn
• Women at Work in the Victorian Novel: The Question of Middle Class Women's Employment (2005)

• Rye, Gill; Browne, Victoria; Giorgio, Adalgisa; Jeremiah, Emily; Six, Abigail Lee
• Motherhood in Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Europe (2018)

• Satire of the Trades, in The Literature of Ancient Egypt
• Satire of the Trades, in The Literature of Ancient Egypt (2003)

  (p.432) 1. The beginning of the teaching which the man of Tjel named Dua-Khety made for his son named Pepy, while he sailed southwards to the Residence to place him in the school of writings among the children of the magistrates, the most eminent men of the Residence.2. Thereupon he spoke to him: Since I have seen those who have been beaten, it is to writings that you must set your mind. See for yourself, it saves one from work. Behold, there is nothing that surpasses writings! They are like a boat upon the water. Read then at the end of...

• Shteyngart, Gary
• Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel (2011)

• Thompson, Edward P
• "Romanticism, Utopianism and Moralism: The Case of William Morris" (1976)

• Vöing, Nerea
• Arbeit und Melancholie: Kulturgeschichte und Narrative in der Gegenwartsliteratur (2019)

• Zakreski, Patricia
• Representing female artistic labour, 1848--1890: refining work for the middle-class woman (2016)