Overview

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 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.

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9781836244899

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Reviews

‘Socialism and British Literature is a complex, closely argued book, but it is also lucid and exact. It makes extensive but judicious use of dense, often difficult theory, explaining even the most challenging concepts clearly and precisely. Its theoretical sophistication does not lead to a neglect of literary texts or their reduction to illustrative examples. The book is composed largely of careful, illuminating close readings of literature. The diversity of these analyses demonstrates a commitment to heterogeneity, not as an abstraction, but as central to analytical and political practice. Socialism and British Literature is a pleasure to read, though often, in the best sense, a demanding one.’ - Ben Clarke, Associate Professor of English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Author Information

Roberto del Valle Alcalá is Associate Professor of English Literature at Södertörn University in Sweden and a Beatriz Galindo Senior Fellow at the University of Alcalá in Spain.

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