Literature and Revolution

OWEN HOLLAND has taught nineteenth-century literature at Jesus College, Oxford and in the English Department at University College London. His first monograph, William Morris's Utopianism: Propaganda, Politics and Prefiguration, was published in 2017, and he has also edited a selection of Morris's political writings for Verso.

"[An] admirable volume . . . . Holland is impressively consistent in his own particular methodology, enabling fresh local readings of individual texts and a convincing overview that offers an integrated, politically revealing interpretation of a relatively discrete literary phenomenon. . . . Particularly interesting is the way Holland extends the historical work of Carolyn J. Eichner and Gay Gullickson on the role of women during the Commune, perhaps exemplified by the magnificent Louise Michel (1830–1905)."— Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy"[An] adroit study. . . . Literature and Revolution features a fascinating and capacious archive of newspaper and periodical reportage, illustrations, poetry, and a surprisingly large corpus of popular novels in which the Commune 'served as their backdrop.'"— Victorian StudiesThis timely book explores the Paris Commune's reverberations in Victorian literature, offering spirited readings of the many popular and canonical British writers who sought to contain (or revivify) it. The result is a fascinating meditation on literature and revolution which stands to make sizeable contributions to both our understanding of the Commune and late-nineteenth-century British literature and culture.— J. Michelle Coghlan, author of Sensational Internationalism: the Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in thThis superb book on the Commune's reception in late nineteenth-century Britain, which scrupulously and perceptively reconstructs the reactions of writers on both the Left and Right of the political spectrum, across a generous range of discursive forms, is a fine testament to Owen Holland's politically committed scholarship.— Matthew Beaumont, author of The Walker: On Finding and Losing Oneself in the Modern City

• Preface1 Introduction: A Commune in Literature2 Refugees, Renegades, and Misrepresentation: Edward Bulwer Lytton and Eliza Lynn Linton3 Dangerous Sympathies: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and Margaret Oliphant4 "Dreams of the Coming Revolution": George Gissing's Workers in the Dawn5 Revolution and Ressentiment: Henry James's The Princess Casamassima6 The Uses of Tragedy: Alfred Austin's The Human Tragedy and William Morris's The Pilgrims of Hope7 "It Had to Come Back": H. G. Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes8 Conclusion: Looking without SeeingAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliography