'The People' and British Literature

Benjamin Kohlmann is the author of Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s (Oxford UP, 2014), British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States (Oxford UP, 2021), and World Literature and the Work of Revolution: A Radical History of the Bildungsroman, 1820–2020 (Verso, 2026). Matthew Taunton is an associate professor in literature at the University of East Anglia, specialising in modern and contemporary writing. He is the author of Red Britain: the Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture (OUP, 2019) and Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris (2009). He is co-editor (with Rachel Potter) of The British Novel of Ideas: George Eliot to Zadie Smith (CUP, 2024), and he is now working on a book called The Collective Voice.

• Introduction; Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton; Part I. Popular Democracy: Representation and the People: 1. Writing the commons, c. 1400 Andrew Galloway; 2. States of peace: anti-war thought within and beyond the nation in the eighteenth century Andrea Haslanger; 3. Antisemitism, sex, and citizenship: G. W. M. Reynolds and Chartism Ella Dzelzainis; 4. Meritocracy, adult education, and 'the people's' culture at the mid-century Natasha Periyan; 5. The common wealth vs. the common good? Race, class, and social citizenship in the welfare state J. Dillon Brown; Part II. The Revolutionary People: 6. The people and the English civil wars John West; 7. 'The scattered million': the people in British radicalism of the 1790s Jon Mee; 8. Revolutionary horizons, reformist hopes: anarchism and radical imagination in an era of mass democracy, 1850–1910 Charlotte Jones; 9. Experiments in left populism: British literature between the wars Elinor Taylor; Part III. 'One of Us': Unity, Difference and the People: 10. Creating the people: history and myth in the national literatures of medieval Britain and Ireland Helen Fulton; 11. 'Art thou base, common and popular?' Shakespearean theatre and the people Peter Womack; 12. Black people, enslaved populations: registration and rights in the British Caribbean, 1787–1838 Ramesh Mallipeddi; 13. Ship-Worlds: from Victorian 'Mob' to people's history Santanu Das; Part IV. In the Name of the People: 14. Dissolving the people Steven Connor; 15. Exhibiting the people: the great exhibition and the iconography of the masses in mid-Victorian print culture Ian Haywood; 16. The people's war: literature and the second world war Sarah Cole; 17. The voices of the people: literature in the thatcher years Joseph Brooker; Part V. The People Now: 18. Devolution, nationalism, and the rhetoric of independence Nick Hubble; 19. The enemy within: literary writing, popular resistance, and the contemporary Mark Steven; 20. The people against the body, queer bodies against the nation João Florêncio; 21. The people, the masses, and the educated elite; or, democracy in the age of the internet Regenia Gagnier.