I Formations; 1. Liverpool the non-contemporaneous city; II Romance and reality: James Hanley and the Sea; 2. A writer of the sea; 3. Realism and autobiography; 4. Men in darkness; 5. The sea and industrialization; 6. Hanley and the Conradian paradigm; III Hanley and Modernism; 7. The dialectics of modernism; 8. Modernism and commodity production; 9. Intellectuals and the working-class writer; 10. Language and the working class; 11. The Furys: Modernism and the working class; IV Hanley and Wales; 12. Itinerancy and settlement: political engagement and rural retreat; 13. The Second World War: crisis and resolution; 14. Spiritual homelands: Ireland, Wales and the ideology of exile; 15. Wales versus London: metropolitan and provincial perspectives; 16. Conclusion; Bibliography