‘Working class literature’ signifies a body and tradition of literary works that are inspirational in their expression of the demand for a genuine human liberation. The term also refers to an ongoing and developing field of critical practices that engage with these writings in ways that articulate, elucidate and promote this demand. My thesis claims a place in this context—first, in its acceptance of the existence of working class literature and, second, through a willingness to participate in the critical field with a collectively shared spirit of literary, critical and political purpose.Because of the specific economic relations that have dominated throughout most of the world in this historical epoch (i.e. since the Industrial Revolution), the most determinate set of antagonistic human social and political relations has been (and still is) between those who labour and those who benefit most from that labour. Those who labour with tools and raw or secondary materials not their own in order to produce valuable goods—for which they receive wages much lower than the exchange value of their products—and their direct dependants, make up the working class; their economic interests are set against those of the ruling class that owns the means of economic production and extracts the resultant surplus value.Within this economic structure the working class, unavoidably, produces cultural forms, one of which is working class literature. While these forms are potentially autonomous from those that tend to predominate and that also tend to reflect and serve ruling class interests, they are susceptible to appropriation by bourgeois interests. This phenomenon is homological with, though more complex than, the extraction of economic surplus value.This outline is, ultimately, informed by economic determinism. But, in an implicit subsidiary argument, economic determinism is shown to be a much more sophisticated and complex theoretical perspective than as it is constructed by bourgeois ideology. It is also shown to be more sophisticated and complex than most of the philosophical idealisms that are dominant in contemporary academic literary practices, because it takes the determinants of culture to be ‘in the last instance’ economie, but at no stage does it refuse the notion that cultural determinants are also cultural, ideological and linguistic.This thesis has three general aims. First, it is a survey of the discourses and issues involved in the theorisation and criticism of working class writing. For reasons that are explored, much of the relevant critical and theoretical work stems from anglophone and Northern Hemisphere discourses and institutions based, more often than not, in Britain. This material is, however, supplemented by important work from outside these limits.The second aim is the analysis of the problems and developments that this work has encountered and produced, in order to posit a retheorised critical methodology for the analysis of working class literature. This is done through a case study of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.The third and final general aim is the application of this methodology in tracing the making of Australian working class literature. The ‘making’ of the title is a conscious allusion to the thesis, posited by E.P. Thompson, that the working class was present at its own making. In this context, the Australian working class is present at and has agency in the making of its own literature.The concept of ‘tracing’ is the central methodological principle of the thesis. It is a practice with several facets: for example, it can refer to the kinds of practice that are used in the work of both detectives and archaeologists. On the one hand, detectives trace knowledges that are usually intentionally hidden; on the other, archaeologists trace knowledges that are historically and structurally buried. The hidden-ness of working class cultural forms is a result of both methods of secreting. My detective work, then, incorporates the unravelling of those bourgeois ideological codes and practices that distort and devalue working class forms, in order to enable a recognition of their value. My archaeological work has been, almost literally, the ‘digging-up’ of working class texts that are buried in the various institutional archives—in, for example, the Mitchell Library in Sydney and the National Library of Australia (NLA) in Canberra. Of course the reasons why some texts need to be ‘dug-up’ is through their initial devaluation by bourgeois ideology. Consequently, a simultaneous combination of both forms of tracing is often necessary.‘Tracing’ also refers to the practice of drawing an outline or a sketch. In this regard, the thesis outlines a framework from which further research on Australian working class literature (by myself and others) can develop. ‘Tracing’ also incorporates concepts such as the ‘marginal’ or the ‘supplement’ that can be extracted from Derridean theory but which are, as is argued, more useful when derived from the work of a thinker like Thompson. ‘Tracing’ also relates to the scientific conception of ‘trace’ elements which are those minimal and residual effects of particular events having taken place.The tracing involved in Part Two is a process of examining the careers of three highly marginal Australian writers: John Grant (1776-?), Henry E. Boote (1865-1949) and Betty Collins (1921-), who hold vital clues as to the nature of the making of the Australian working class, its limits and its capacities.The analysis of each of these writers produces further issues. John Grant was a convict who spent the years 1804-1811 in Australia. His journal and poetry raises questions about the possibility of the existence of a radical (middle class) intellectual culture in the early colonial period (1788-1828). His mediations of radical discontent also bring into focus the lack of primary documentary records of a class-conscious broadside and ballad culture that existed in the same period.The literary career of long-term Worker Editor, Henry E. Boote who, in terms of number of words written (as opposed to published), is one of Australia’s most prolific creative writers, suggests that a thorough revision of many of the literary histories of the period from 1890-1939 is required. His role in labour/literary culture has been underestimated, while the respective positions of the Bulletin. William Lane and Henry Lawson, for example, have been assumed to be pre-eminent. While this thesis does not necessarily deconstruct these positions, it does argue that if Henry Boote’s works, and the texts he promoted, were as widely read by the working class as can be assumed from some of the evidence, then the various racist, xenophobic and masculinist constructions of Australian socialist discourse need to be re-examined and modified.The final individual, Betty Collins, is perhaps the cornerstone on which this thesis is built. Her novel, The Copper Crucible along with the implications of its complex genesis and bowdlerisation, was the text which had a major role in itsViliinstigation. Unlike the case with Grant and Boote, the analyses of whom are relatively discrete and which produce specific conclusions, my engagement with Collins’ work has a more determinate influence. Its conclusions are also more general and diffused throughout the thesis. Nevertheless, my investigation of Collins’ work produces at least three identifiable issues for analysis: aesthetics and working class writing; working class women’s writing; and the Realist Writers’ movement, of which she was a long term member. The latter analysis is the one around which the thesis concludes.Finally, I have consciously avoided taking what would be called (if the history were widely researched) the ‘mainstream’ working class literary route. In the process of research I have learnt so much about the writers on whom I focus that the thesis has ended up bearing little relation to the one I envisaged upon commencement. The thesis is not a seamless one either, because this kind of document would not represent the state of play as it stands in relation to the research on working class literature in Australia. I have taken the notions of the trace and marginality very seriously in trying to force three obscured literary figures into the centre of analysis; and in so doing I hope I have left the field wide open for any researchers who might care to follow.