British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age?

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Britain's imperial power and influence was at its height. These were years of daring, when adventurers sounded the mysteries of the deep sea and the distant poles, aviators sped through the skies, and new media technologies transformed communication. They were years of social upheaval, during which long-suppressed voices – particularly those of women, of the labouring classes, and of colonial subjects – grew louder and demanded to be heard. They were years of violence, of insurrection and political agitation, and of imperial conflicts that would encompass continents. By subjecting specific developments in literature and related culture to a fine-grained and historically-informed analysis, British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age? explores the writing of this extraordinary period in all its complexity and vibrancy.

Introduction

The Introduction begins to outline a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain around 1900 by turning to a period that forces us to look beyond the connotations associated with the terms reform and revolution today. The chapter presents the book’s two intertwined goals, one reconstructive and literary-historical, the other conceptual and theoretical. First, British Literature and the Life of Institutions reconstructs the emergence of a reformist literary mode around 1900 by exploring how literary texts responded and adapted to the elongated rhythms of institutional change that characterized the emergence of new state structures in this period. But the book also, secondly, aims to make visible a reformist idiom which pervades literary, philosophical, political, and social writing of the period, and which insists that we need to think about the state as an idea, as a speculative figure, rather than as a set of administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes.

British Literature and the Life of Institutions

Speculative States pursues two related goals, one reconstructive and literary-historical, the other conceptual. First, the book restores to view literature’s engagements with the slow politics of reform by linking the development of the institutional forms of the state to the aesthetic forms of literary writing. In doing so, it maps out a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain that spans the late Victorian and modernist periods. Second, the book also makes visible an ambitious reformist idiom which insists that we think about the state as an aspirational (speculative) figure—as a form of life in its own right rather than as a set of detached administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes. Placing literary studies in dialogue with political theory, philosophy, and the history of ideas, Speculative States marks a major contribution to current debates about literature and the state, but it also centrally intervenes in conversations in critical theory by urging a fuller engagement with the critical and speculative dimensions of the dialectical imagination.

There are some alternatives: Remembering 1980s Britain in contemporary British literature

<p>This thesis explores how the 1980s haunt contemporary British literature. Cognizant of a trend of cultural production (literary, film, television, music) interested in this period since the beginning of the twenty-first century, this thesis focuses on three historical novels by three critically acclaimed authors: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, David Peace’s GB84 (both 2004) and David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006). It reads these historical novels as memory texts conditioned both by their moment of publication (mid-2000s Britain under the premiership of Tony Blair) and the moments of the 1980s that they remember (1980s Britain under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher). These novels are oriented around different facets of the 1980s (the high-Tory world, the 1984-85 miners’ strike and the Falklands War respectively) and so, read together, offer a cumulative portrait of the decade. However, each novel is read on its own terms for its specific interests in the public aspects of the 1980s. This thesis is thus divided into three chapters, with each taking a different memory discourse or mode as its analytical approach, as invited by the particularities of the novel it examines. The Line of Beauty is read in terms of the spectral presence of heritage; GB84 in terms of occulted and occulting nostalgia; Black Swan Green in terms of the media and postcolonial melancholia.</p>

There are some alternatives: Remembering 1980s Britain in contemporary British literature

<p>This thesis explores how the 1980s haunt contemporary British literature. Cognizant of a trend of cultural production (literary, film, television, music) interested in this period since the beginning of the twenty-first century, this thesis focuses on three historical novels by three critically acclaimed authors: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, David Peace’s GB84 (both 2004) and David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006). It reads these historical novels as memory texts conditioned both by their moment of publication (mid-2000s Britain under the premiership of Tony Blair) and the moments of the 1980s that they remember (1980s Britain under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher). These novels are oriented around different facets of the 1980s (the high-Tory world, the 1984-85 miners’ strike and the Falklands War respectively) and so, read together, offer a cumulative portrait of the decade. However, each novel is read on its own terms for its specific interests in the public aspects of the 1980s. This thesis is thus divided into three chapters, with each taking a different memory discourse or mode as its analytical approach, as invited by the particularities of the novel it examines. The Line of Beauty is read in terms of the spectral presence of heritage; GB84 in terms of occulted and occulting nostalgia; Black Swan Green in terms of the media and postcolonial melancholia.</p>

Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature

Whereas modernist writers lauded the consecrated realm of subjective interiority, mid-century writers were engrossed by the materialization of the collective mind. An obsession with group thinking was fueled by the establishment of academic sociology and the ubiquitous infiltration of public opinion research into a bevy of cultural and governmental institutions. As authors witnessed the materialization of the once-opaque realm of public consciousness for the first time, their writings imagined the potentialities of such technologies for the body politic. Polling opened new horizons for mass politics. Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature: The Psychographic Turn traces this most crucial period of group psychology’s evolution—the mid-century—when “psychography,” a term originating in Victorian spiritualism, transformed into a scientific praxis. The imbrication of British writers within a growing institutionalized public opinion infrastructure bolstered an aesthetic turn towards collectivity and an interest in the political ramifications of meta-psychological discourse. Examining works by H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Val Gielgud, Olaf Stapledon, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, Celia Fremlin, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Elizabeth Bowen, this book utilizes extensive archival research to trace the embeddedness of writers within public opinion institutions, providing a new explanation for the new “material” turn so often associated with interwar writing.