Overview

Red Britain sets out a provocative rethinking of the cultural politics of mid-century Britain by drawing attention to the extent, diversity, and longevity of the cultural effects of the Russian Revolution. Drawing on new archival research and historical scholarship, this book explores the conceptual, discursive, and formal reverberations of the Bolshevik Revolution in British literature and culture. It provides new insight into canonical writers including Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Dorothy Richardson, H.G Wells, and Raymond Williams, as well bringing to attention a cast of less-studied writers, intellectuals, journalists, and visitors to the Soviet Union. Red Britain shows that the cultural resonances of the Russian Revolution are more far-reaching and various than has previously been acknowledged. Each of the five chapters takes as its subject one particular problem or debate, and investigates the ways in which it was politicised as a result of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent development of the Soviet state. The chapters focus on the idea of the future; numbers and arithmetic; law and justice; debates around agriculture and landowning; and finally orality, literacy, and religion. In all of these spheres, Red Britain shows how the medievalist, romantic, oral, pastoral, anarchic, and ethical emphases of English socialism clashed with, and were sometimes overwritten by, futurist, utilitarian, literate, urban, statist, and economistic ideas associated with the Bolshevik Revolution.

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9780198817710

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Reviews

engaging and thoughtful study of the cultural consequences of the Russian Revolution for British culture, a valuable transnational addition to Oxford's Mid-Century Studies series of monographs. * Guy Woodward, Textual Practice *

engaging and thoughtful study of the cultural consequences of the Russian Revolution for British culture, a valuable transnational addition to Oxford's Mid-Century Studies series of monographs. * Guy Woodward, Textual Practice * It is a truly massive topic handled with elan, and I believe it will repay further readings and additional study ... Red Britain does a wonderful job harkening to the wider world of its setting while never getting bogged down in minutiae, but it does give the reader, or at least this reader, the itch to read more around his monograph about the period. * Matthew Chambers, Modernist Review *

engaging and thoughtful study of the cultural consequences of the Russian Revolution for British culture, a valuable transnational addition to Oxford's Mid-Century Studies series of monographs. * Guy Woodward, Textual Practice * It is a truly massive topic handled with elan, and I believe it will repay further readings and additional study ... Red Britain does a wonderful job harkening to the wider world of its setting while never getting bogged down in minutiae, but it does give the reader, or at least this reader, the itch to read more around his monograph about the period. * Matthew Chambers, Modernist Review * Taunton boldly expands the realms of both historical periodization and interpretation in this examination of the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on British literature. Dissatisfied with traditional views, Taunton advances into the long 1930s rather than remaining within the bookends of that decade; he pushes the origins back to the Russian Revolution itself and explores even earlier aspects of Russian culture that directly and indirectly impacted the thinkers and writers of Russia and Britain into the 1950s and beyond... Taunton mines Russian and British writers, cultures, and traditions in great depth, looking at a plethora of subjects, their origins, outgrowths, and apparent impacts in diverse fields, including language itself. Red Britain is ambitious, challenging, and rewarding... Highly Recommended * J. A. Young, CHOICE *

engaging and thoughtful study of the cultural consequences of the Russian Revolution for British culture, a valuable transnational addition to Oxford's Mid-Century Studies series of monographs. * Guy Woodward, Textual Practice * It is a truly massive topic handled with elan, and I believe it will repay further readings and additional study ... Red Britain does a wonderful job harkening to the wider world of its setting while never getting bogged down in minutiae, but it does give the reader, or at least this reader, the itch to read more around his monograph about the period. * Matthew Chambers, Modernist Review * The hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 rekindled the question of the significance of that major event ... Matthew Taunton's Red Britain: The Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture makes a valuable contribution to the conversation ... Taunton's expert readings of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell provide solid foundations for several arguments throughout the book, and each chapter brings nuanced and thoroughly researched assessments of key debates in mid-century British culture ... The large scope of Taunton's research allows him to make connections between periods and topics rarely put side by side. * Olivier Jacques, The Comparatist * Taunton boldly expands the realms of both historical periodization and interpretation in this examination of the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on British literature. Dissatisfied with traditional views, Taunton advances into the long 1930s rather than remaining within the bookends of that decade; he pushes the origins back to the Russian Revolution itself and explores even earlier aspects of Russian culture that directly and indirectly impacted the thinkers and writers of Russia and Britain into the 1950s and beyond... Taunton mines Russian and British writers, cultures, and traditions in great depth, looking at a plethora of subjects, their origins, outgrowths, and apparent impacts in diverse fields, including language itself. Red Britain is ambitious, challenging, and rewarding... Highly Recommended * J. A. Young, CHOICE *

Author Information

Matthew Taunton is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at University of East Anglia. He is the author of Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris (Palgrave, 2009). He has also published articles and book chapters on modern literature and politics, and on cities. With Benjamin Kohlmann, he co-edited A History of 1930s British Literature (Cambridge UP, 2018), as well as a special issue of Literature & History called Literatures of Anti-Communism (2015). He is deputy editor of Critical Quarterly.

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