Writing the Common Good: Literature, Economic Liberalism, and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1776-1911
Final Report Abstract
During the funding period I worked mainly on two projects: (1) I worked on the manuscript of my monograph British Literature, Reform, and the Idea of the Welfare State. This project traces the genealogy of a reformist literary mode between 1850 and 1920, and it focuses on literature’s response to the slow rhythms of political reform rather than to the promises and threats of abrupt revolutionary change. Moreover, as part of this research, I also spent several months conducting archival research at the University of Cambridge (consulting mainly the Papers of the economist Leo Chiozza Money and the Papers of E.M. Forster and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson) at the University of Oxford (the Papers of T.H. Green), in Sheffield (the Archives of Edward Carpenter), and at the London School of Economics (the archives of the Fabian society and the papers of William Beveridge). (2) In addition to my work on the monograph, Dr Matthew Taunton and I also continued our collaborative work on A History of 1930s British Literature. This edited collection, which comprises twenty-six newly commissioned chapters, undertakes a fundamental revision of the literature and culture of the 1930s: while the literature of the 1930s is often read as a cautionary tale which demonstrates the incompatibility of literature and politics, our collection rehabilitates the decade as a transformational moment in twentieth-century literary culture which fundamentally changed the way we think about the relationship between the nation and the global, about the status of the aesthetic vis-à-vis politics, and about the place of literature within a larger institutional and media ecology. In addition, I also completed the first draft of a spin-off article, entitled “Proletarian Modernism: Film, Literature Theory”. This article, which has since been accepted for publication by an academic journal, identifies a body of films, literary texts, and theories of the aesthetic which ask what it means for an artwork to project a vision of classlessness – a question I approach by reconstructing a set of left-wing conversations about art and by exploring how these conversations became linked to a particular understanding of literary/artistic modernism.
Publications
- (2019) Proletarian Modernism: Film, Literature, Theory. Publ. Mod. Lang. Assoc. Am. (PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America) 134 (5) 1056–1075
Kohlmann, Benjamin
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.5.1056) - A History of 1930s British Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2019. xiv, 461 S.
Benjamin Kohlmann, Matthew Taunton Hrsg.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108565592) - (2021): British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Oxford University Press
Benjamin Kohlmann
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198836179.001.0001)
