Matthew Taunton – författare

Red Britain sets out a provocative rethinking of the cultural politics of mid-century Britain by drawing attention to the extent, diversity, and longevity of the cultural effects of the Russian Revolution. Drawing on new archival research and historical scholarship, this book explores the conceptual, discursive, and formal reverberations of the Bolshevik Revolution in British literature and culture. It provides new insight into canonical writers including Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Dorothy Richardson, H.G Wells, and Raymond Williams, as well bringing to attention a cast of less-studied writers, intellectuals, journalists, and visitors to the Soviet Union. Red Britain shows that the cultural resonances of the Russian Revolution are more far-reaching and various than has previously been acknowledged. Each of the five chapters takes as its subject one particular problem or debate, and investigates the ways in which it was politicised as a result of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent development of the Soviet state. The chapters focus on the idea of the future; numbers and arithmetic; law and justice; debates around agriculture and landowning; and finally orality, literacy, and religion. In all of these spheres, Red Britain shows how the medievalist, romantic, oral, pastoral, anarchic, and ethical emphases of English socialism clashed with, and were sometimes overwritten by, futurist, utilitarian, literate, urban, statist, and economistic ideas associated with the Bolshevik Revolution.

Many studies of fictions of city life take the flâneur as the characteristic metropolitan type and streets and plazas as definitive urban spaces. Looking at novels and films set in London and Paris from  L'Assommoir  to Nil By Mouth , this book shows that mass housing is equally central to images of the modern city.

Why do invocations of 'the people' carry such force in current political discourse and public debate? This book offers an ambitiously transhistorical account of the ways that 'the people' has figured in British literature and culture. Ranging from the later mediaeval period to the present, the twenty-three chapters draw on substantial new research to show that the figure of the people has been put to reactionary and progressive ends and that its meanings are less obvious and fixed than contemporary commentators would have us believe. Providing a much-needed critical prehistory for our own current moment, the contributors also build on ideas and methods from other disciplines, such as political theory, sociology, and media history. As such, this important new volume will be of interest to a wide range of readers across periods and disciplines.

This History offers a new and comprehensive picture of 1930s British literature. The '30s have often been cast as a literary-historical anomaly, either as a 'low, dishonest decade', a doomed experiment in combining art and politics, or as a 'late modernist' afterthought to the intense period of artistic experimentation in the 1920s. By contrast, the contributors to this volume explore the contours of a 'long 1930s' by repositioning the decade and its characteristic concerns at the heart of twentieth-century literary history. This book expands the range of writers covered, moving beyond a narrow focus on towering canonical figures to draw in a more diverse cast of characters, in terms of race, gender, class, and forms of artistic expression. The book's four sections emphasize the decade's characteristic geographical and sexual identities; the new media landscapes and institutional settings its writers operated in; questions of commitment and autonomy; and British writing's international entanglements.

The novel of ideas is an important form that is both under-theorised and largely neglected in accounts of the development of the novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book sets out the history of this critical hostility, which took hold as the aesthetic protocols of literary modernism became established among key literary tastemakers in Britain. It then proposes a revaluation and a critical reclamation of the novel of ideas, showcasing a range of perceptive, sympathetic, and sensitive ways of reading novels in which discursive argumentation is foregrounded and where the clash of ideas is vital to the novelistic effect. Through thematic chapters as well as new accounts of key novelists in the British tradition-including George Eliot, H. G. Wells, Doris Lessing and Kamila Shamsie-this book repositions the novel of ideas as a major form in modern British literature.

Many studies of fictions of city life take the flâneur as the characteristic metropolitan type and streets and plazas as definitive urban spaces. Looking at novels and films set in London and Paris from  L'Assommoir  to Nil By Mouth , this book shows that mass housing is equally central to images of the modern city.

While collective speech can seem a disparate set of practices – from prayers to protest chants, and from football songs to oaths of allegiance and national anthems – Matthew Taunton argues that we can think of these together. Speaking in unison is often considered to be in decline in an individualistic modernity, and associated with earlier, more ritualistic, and even 'primitive' states of being. In this incisive new book, Taunton draws on a fascinating archive of literary texts from Britain, Continental Europe, North America, Africa and the Caribbean, to demonstrate the ongoing importance of the collective voice in building group solidarity, with a variety of political meanings. Analyzing texts and performances by writers including Kathrine Burdekin, T.S. Eliot, Jane Harrison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jack Lindsay, Jacques Roumain, Ousman Sembène, and Wole Soyinka, the book maps the relationship of different forms of collective vocalization to political power, with chapters that observe the collective voice in positions of refusal, protest, and hegemony. Combining historical contextualization, detailed formal analysis, and social and political theory, Taunton argues that a critical account of the functions of the collective voice is essential to understanding the contemporary rise of far-right, nationalist, and fascist politics, and shows how radical and left-wing writers have tapped the more egalitarian potentials of collective speech.