Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817-1918 Mark A. Allison

Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817-1918 Mark A. Allison – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 2020945736,9780192650436,0192650432

Product details:

• ISBN 10: 0192650432
• ISBN 13: 9780192650436
• Author: Mark A. Allison

“Socialism” names a form of collective life that has never been fully realized; consequently, it is best understood as a goal to be imagined. So this study argues, and thereby uncovers an aesthetic impulse that animates some of the most consequential socialist writing, thought, and practice of the long nineteenth century. Imagining Socialism explores this tradition of radical activism, investigating the diverse ways that British socialists—from Robert Owen to the mid-century Christian Socialists to William Morris—marshalled the resources of the aesthetic in their efforts to surmount “politics” and develop non-governmental forms of collective life. Their ambitious attempts at social regeneration led some socialists to explore the liberatory possibilities afforded by cooperative labor, women’s emancipation, political violence, and the power of the arts themselves. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that, far from being confined to the “socialist revival” of the fin de siècle, important socialist experiments with the emancipatory potential of the aesthetic in Britain may be found throughout the period it calls the “socialist century”—and may still inspire us today.

Table contents:

Part 1. “Society Is a Simple and Beautiful Science”: Aesthetics and Anti-Politics in Robert Owen’s Socialism

A New View of Owenism?

England in 1817

The Hieroglyph

Owen’s Communitarianism_ The Magic Parallelogram

“Governed Through Education Alone”: Owen’s System of Character Formation

The Proletarian Aesthetic Education of Man

Coda: Malthus, Anti-Socialist Discourse, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment

Part 2. Poetic Vanguardism and Political Violence in Capel Lofft’s “Chartist Epic”

Revolution at the Gates

Vanguardism and the Poet’s Dilemma

Oratory, Pedagogy, and the Dangers of Eloquence

Poets and the “Fervent Faculty”

The Empty Throne

Currents of Radicalism in the 1830s and 1840s

Agrarian Radicalism and the Owenite/Chartist Nexus

The Poet Vanishes

Part 3. Self-Consuming Socialism: Affect, Ideology, and Aesthetics in the Christian Socialist Movement

To “Christianise Socialism”

The Working Men’s Associations and the Institutionalization of Socialism

The Limits of Christian Socialism

Alton Locke, Capitalism, and the Cannibalistic Imperative

Coda: The Sanitization of Socialism

Part 4. Utopian Socialism, Women’s Emancipation, and the Origins of Middlemarch

“Wonderful Plans”

Suffrage, Socialism, and the Composition of Middlemarch

The Empty Chair

Coda: The New Jerusalem

Part 5. “What Is to Come After This?”: William Morris, News from Nowhere, and the Aesthetics of Fin-de-Siècle Socialism

Sight, Seduction, Socialism

There’s Something About Ellen (i): The Simple Life

There’s Something About Ellen (ii): “The Art of Life”

The Journey’s End

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