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Book Cover
E-book
Author Kohlmann, Benjamin, 1981- author.

Title British literature and the life of institutions : speculative states / Benjamin Kohlmann
Edition First edition
Published Oxford ; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2021
©2021

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Description 1 online resource : illustrations
Contents Front Matter -- Introduction: Thinking the State (Again) -- 1. Literature as Speculative Thought: Britain's Long Hegelian Moment, c.1900 -- 2. 'The Hope of Pessimism': George Gissing, Mary Ward, and the Idea of an Institution -- 3. 'True Ownership': Edward Carpenter and the Nationalization of Land -- 4. 'Kinetic' Reform: H. G. Wells and Redistributive Taxation -- 5. Welfare State Romance: E. M. Forster and Unemployment Insurance -- Coda: Reformist Legacies -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary "Speculative States pursues two related goals, one reconstructive and literary-historical, the other conceptual. First, the book restores to view literature's engagements with the slow politics of reform by linking the development of the institutional forms of the state to the aesthetic forms of literary writing. In doing so, it maps out a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain that spans the late Victorian and modernist periods. Second, the book also makes visible an ambitious reformist idiom which insists that we think about the state as an aspirational (speculative) figure--as a form of life in its own right rather than as a set of detached administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes. Placing literary studies in dialogue with political theory, philosophy, and the history of ideas, Speculative States marks a major contribution to current debates about literature and the state, but it also centrally intervenes in conversations in critical theory by urging a fuller engagement with the critical and speculative dimensions of the dialectical imagination"--Publisher's description
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from PDF title page (Oxford Scholarship Online, viewed on July 22, 2022)
Subject English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism
Welfare state in literature.
Economics in literature.
Social problems in literature.
State, The, in literature.
Literature and society -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
Literature and society -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century
State, The, in literature
Social problems in literature
Literature and society
Economics in literature
English literature
Welfare state in literature
Great Britain
Genre/Form History
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780191945588
0191945587
9780192573179
0192573179