"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 socialistsDLfrom Robert Owen
to the mid-century Christian Socialists to William MorrisDLmarshalled 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"DLand may still inspire us today.
"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 socialistsDLfrom Robert Owen
to the mid-century Christian Socialists to William MorrisDLmarshalled 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"DLand may still inspire us today.
Introduction: A Socialist Century
1: Society is a Simple and Beautiful Science": Aesthetics and
Anti-Politics in Robert Owen's Socialism
2: Poetic Vanguardism and Political Violence in Capel Lofft's
"Chartist Epic"
3: Self-Consuming Socialism: Affect, Ideology, and Aesthetics in
the Christian Socialist Movement
4: Utopian Socialism, Women's Emancipation, and the Origins of
Middlemarch
5: "What is to Come After This?": William Morris, News from
Nowhere, and the Aesthetics of Fin-de-Siècle Socialism
Epilogue: The Party Fight
Mark A. Allison is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he is also Co-Director of the University Honors Program. His work has appeared in English Literary History (ELH), Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Utopian Studies, among other venues. He is currently working on Anglophone utopian literature in the long nineteenth century, as well as projects concerning socialist, radical, and communitarian authors.
Imagining Socialism is especially skilled at drawing out a text's
constitutive tensions, showing them to reflect larger
contradictions within the socialist formations they engage.
*Wanne Mendonck, Cambridge Quarterly *
In Imagining Socialism, Mark A. Allison takes as his subject the
entanglement of nineteenth-century British socialism with artistic,
literary, and other aesthetic endeavours. This is by no means a new
project: Ian Britain, Ruth Livesey, Diana Maltz and Chris Waters,
among others, have noted the central role aesthetics played in late
nineteenth-century socialist circles. What makes Allison's
Imagining Socialism unique, however, is its association of the
creative and artistic socialism that emerged towards the end of the
century ...
*Sophie Thompson, CHASE-funded PhD researcher at the University of
Kent, Romance, Revolution, and Reform*
Mark Allison's detailed, comprehensive, and engaging study
Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-Politics, and Literature in
Britain, 1817-1918 is relatively novel in delineating the contours
of a coherent tradition that is bookended.
*Owen Holland, Utopian Studies*
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