Between High Culture and the Working Class: Typographic Communities in Leipzig, Vienna, and Prague, 1840–1914
Author:
Jakub Raška
Year of publication:
2026
Publisher:
Academia
ISBN:
978-80-200-3699-5
Using the example of a small but highly skilled – and distinctly elitist – group of workers, this book traces the rise of the labour movement during an era of profound social and political transformation, from the eve of the Revolutions of 1848 to the outbreak of the First World War. Its central focus is the changing collective identities of manual workers in the modern era, understood as a precondition for the emergence of collective strategies and forms of action within social movements. The book examines the traditions, symbols, and occupational culture of typographers, shaped since the invention of printing, as well as the evolution of labour conflict and collective bargaining under mature industrial capitalism and the mass labour movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores typographers’ networks of solidarity not only in relation to other groups of workers but also in relation to the non-working-class environment – above all the educated bourgeois milieu, which played a crucial role in shaping typographers’ social identity and aspirations.
