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Explores how late Victorian, Edwardian, and modernist literary texts responded and adapted to institutional change that characterized the emergence of the welfare state, and links the development of the institutional forms of the state to the aesthetic forms of literary writing.
List of contents
- Introduction: Thinking the State (Again)
- 1: Literature as Speculative Thought: Britain's Long Hegelian Moment, c.1900
- 2: "The Hope of Pessimism": George Gissing, Mary Ward, and the Idea of an Institution
- 3: "True Ownership": Edward Carpenter and the Nationalization of Land
- 4: "Kinetic" Reform: H. G. Wells and Redistributive Taxation
- 5: Welfare State Romance: E. M. Forster and Unemployment Insurance
- Coda: Reformist Legacies
About the author
Benjamin Kohlmann teaches English literature at the University of Regensburg. His first monograph, Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. With Matthew Taunton he is co-editor of A History of 1930s British Literature (CUP, 2019), and his articles have been published in PMLA, ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, Novel, and other journals.
Summary
British Literature and the Life of Institutions charts a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain around 1900, but it also marks a major intervention in current theoretical debates about critique and the dialectical imagination. By placing literary studies in dialogue with political theory, philosophy, and the history of ideas, the book reclaims a substantive reformist language that we have ignored to our own loss. This reformist idiom made it possible to imagine the state as a speculative and aspirational idea--as a fully realized form of life rather than as an uninspiring ensemble of administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes. This volume traces the resonances of this idiom from the Victorian period to modernism, ranging from Mary Augusta Ward, George Gissing, and H. G. Wells, to Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf. Compared to this reformist language, the economism that dominates current debates about the welfare state signals an impoverishment that is at once intellectual, cultural, and political. Critiquing the shortcomings of the welfare state comes naturally to us, but we often struggle to offer up convincing defences of its principles and aims. This book intervenes in these debates by urging a richer understanding of critique: if we want to defend the state, Kohlmann argues, we need to learn to think about it again.
Additional text
While Kohlmann's rigorous and erudite book covers the "intense reformist activity around 1900", it couldn't be more relevant today... As Kohlmann points out, we can't enter the debate, let alone win it, without a language to consider the state as something capable of solving problems. Kohlmann's serious look at these tough questions a century ago helps us understand that we all have a role to play in finding the language to change what is not working.
