Socialism and British Literature: A People to Come

An Open Access edition is available on the Liverpool University Press website, thanks to funding from the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.This book offers an original reinterpretation of the literary history of British socialism in the long twentieth century and a theoretical investigation into the relationship between radical politics and writing more generally. Through detailed close readings of fiction and other prose forms, Socialism and British Literature argues that the discursively open and historically contingent language of 'the people', where 'the people' is understood as a political subject without necessary determinations or objective guarantees (a people that needs to be assembled or imagined, a people that is always yet to come), is at the heart of literary engagements with the idea of socialism in Britain. Across fictional and creative explorations of left-wing politics, from the nineteenth-century ideological contexts which eventually gave rise to mass socialist movements at the beginning of the twentieth century to early twenty-first-century recreations of radical politics, what transpires is an impulse both to expand the discursive forms and identities of ‘socialism’ and to disengage them from any given or fixed socio-economic position. Read more