“Priceless Gems of Living Thought”: Literary Encounters with Anarchism at the fin de siècle
About
Why did Oscar Wilde post bail for a decadent poet who opened fire on Parliament? Why did the descendants of prominent Pre-Raphaelite painters print a seditious magazine from the basement of their parents’ home? And what do such examples reveal about the complex relationship between radical politics and literature in the nineteenth century? More specifically, to what extent were literary networks entwined with anarchist networks?
Amid a series of bombing campaigns across nineteenth-century Europe, anarchist ideas such as direct action, propaganda by deed and mutual aid became vital to leftist politics. In London, where exile and émigré anarchists gathered, this culture of transnational exchange and radical autonomy transformed literary aesthetics. Critical understanding of radical politics and literature in the nineteenth century – hitherto dominated by discussion of the “socialist revival” – is transformed if we re-centre anarchism.
By reading late Victorian and early modernist literature in the context of contemporaneous anarchist thought and praxis, I intend to show that anarchism’s widespread influence on the production, circulation, and reception of literature at this time creates new socio-aesthetic relationships across class, gender, and national boundaries. While literary studies inspired by Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” tend to be dominated by the category of the nation, my PhD seeks to show how such practices take place both beyond and within national boundaries.
Alongside close analysis of works by anarchist fellow-travellers William Morris and Oscar Wilde, I will develop a critical understanding of neglected texts such as Helen and Olivia Rossetti's journalism and fictionalised memoir A Girl Among the Anarchists (1903). A fourth chapter will reclaim Ethel Carnie Holdsworth – the first working-class woman to publish a novel in Britain – as a writer whose poetry about industrial poverty in Lancashire fuses transnational cosmopolitan radicalism with a commitment to provincial localism.
