Overview

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.

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9780198836179

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Reviews

An important contribution to the literary and intellectual history of Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as to contemporary debates on critique and post-critique. Focusing on a constellation of thinkers and writers who gave voice to a reformist imaginary, Kohlmann helps us to think about reform and the state anew. A powerful defense of the slow politics of progressive reform informed by aspirations to live otherwise. * Amanda Anderson, Director, Cogut Institute for the Humanities and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English, Brown University * British Literature and the Life of Institutions is a serious achievement: a genuinely important contribution not only to Victorian and modernist literary studies, but to the wider conversation about literature and critique today. By bringing back into play a much more positive conception of the state's role in our lives than has dominated cultural criticism in recent decades, Kohlmann gives depth and analytic edge to accounts of political reformism, restoring a vocabulary for 'long revolutionary' commitments to a more egalitarian society. Victorian and Edwardian literature look different in the light of his readings; so too does the long arc of argument over the nature and scope of criticism's commitments through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. * Helen Small, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford * An irreplaceable contribution to our understanding of literature and philosophy around 1900—and a model for contemporary scholarship. Meticulously, and with exceptional clarity of view, Kohlmann counters threadbare conceptions of the state as necessarily inflexible, monolithic, and at odds with social life. * Douglas Mao, Russ Family Professor in the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University * A deeply researched, tightly argued, and immensely valuable study. It stands among the strongest contributions to the growing new institutionalism in literary studies...A fascinating treatment of its subject...Makes a case for the importance of thinking institutions differently in the present: this is as much a work of intellectual history and reclamation as of literary scholarship. * Robert Higney, The City College Of New York *

British Literature and the Life of Institutions is a serious achievement: a genuinely important contribution not only to Victorian and modernist literary studies, but to the wider conversation about literature and critique today. By bringing back into play a much more positive conception of the state's role in our lives than has dominated cultural criticism in recent decades, Kohlmann gives depth and analytic edge to accounts of political reformism, restoring a vocabulary for 'long revolutionary' commitments to a more egalitarian society. Victorian and Edwardian literature look different in the light of his readings; so too does the long arc of argument over the nature and scope of criticism's commitments through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. * Helen Small, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford * An irreplaceable contribution to our understanding of literature and philosophy around 1900-and a model for contemporary scholarship. Meticulously, and with exceptional clarity of view, Kohlmann counters threadbare conceptions of the state as necessarily inflexible, monolithic, and at odds with social life. * Douglas Mao, Russ Family Professor in the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University *

Author Information

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.

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