H. Gustav Klaus is Professor of the Literature of the British Isles, Universität Rostock, Germany. He has held visiting posts as visiting Professor, University of Queensland; Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh and visiting Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His several publications include: The Rise of socialist fiction, 1880-1914 (1987), Factory Girl (1998) and (as co-editor) British Industrial Fiction (2000), James Kelman (2004), To hell with culture: anarchism and twentieth-century British literature (2005).