Literature as Ideology incarnate

Critics attacked the working-class writer Walter Greenwood for propagating middle-class values in retaining the bourgeois form of the classic realist novel without question. He was a working-class novelist, writing about working-class life, but he never challenged the bourgeois novel's structure or underlying ideology. 
In many ways, Greenwood's acclaimed novel, Love on the Dole (1933) conforms to bourgeois realist conventions:

• The plot is strongly foregrounded.
• The main action turns on the central character, Harry Hardcastle, with his changing fortunes.
• The narrative is composed of inflated diction and literary allusion, which seems inappropriate for a novel embodying working-class consciousness. 

The fact that Greenwood was criticised for propagating bourgeois ideology subscribes to the idea that literature is ideology incarnate. Marxist critics argue that the form of the novel is not neutral but is beset with bourgeois ideology, therefore: 
                   
                    To write in a literary way in modern society is to collude with class divisions
                    - the institution of literature testifies to the division of language and classes. 

It follows that working-class fiction can (and should) challenge bourgeois literary conventions by subverting conventional realist texts. And it can do this with attention to form, individualism, progression, linearity and resolution.