This chapter discusses two early anarchist conceptions of utopianism, a romantic conception associated with Gustav Landauer and a rationalist ideal linked to Peter Kropotkin. I argue that the differences have been exaggerated. Landauer and Kropotkin followed different paths, but they formulated their responses to utopianism in the same context,…[Read more]

This article examines William Morris’s idea of Englishness, considered through a critique of his concept of fellowship or community. It looks at the charge
that Morris wrongly neglected the importance of nationality as a focus for organization in socialism, preferring instead an internationalist ideal, based on an
unworkable model of s…[Read more]

This paper examines the politics of Morris’s understanding of art in socialism. At the centre of the analysis is the claim Morris makes for art’s democratisation and his commitment to the transformation of labour – into productive leisure – through art. The conditions for this transformation, namely, the abolition of commerce and the realisa…[Read more]

This chapter discusses William Morris’s rejection of anarchist communism as individualistic. The first discusses his treatment of anarchist communism as a generic form. It
examines his motivations for advancing the critique and sets out the key concepts on which he later relied to develop his analysis of decision-making. The relationship between…[Read more]

This article examines Ernest Belfort Bax’s interpretation of the French Revolution and traces the impact that his idea of the Revolution had on his philosophy and his political thought. The first section considers Bax’s understanding of the Revolution in the context of his theory of history and analyses his conception of the Revolution’s legacy,…[Read more]

In the ten years following the publication of the infamous Reports on the State of Education in Wales (1847) that had classified the Welsh population as a vice-ridden nation of working-class drunkards and promiscuous hoydens, the middle-classes in Wales strongly rejected this Anglo-centric condemnation at first in the press and, later on, in…[Read more]

In the ten years following the publication of the infamous Reports on the State of Education in Wales (1847) that had classified the Welsh population as a vice-ridden nation of working-class drunkards and promiscuous hoydens, the middle-classes in Wales strongly rejected this Anglo-centric condemnation at first in the press and, later on, in…[Read more]

Projects that bridge the humanities and sciences often attract attention from journalists, but evoke dismay from humanists who feel that their subjects of expertise have been misinterpreted. For the humanities to reclaim a place of pride in public conversation, humanists themselves need to embrace interdisciplinarity and take the lead in this…[Read more]

It is well known that the literary history of Latin America and its canon has been/is written by a patriarchal Eurocentric society that controls what constitutes national literature. It is also established that (colonial/contemporary) Latin American subjects in the periphery of the urban republic of letters are not included due to their gender…[Read more]

Published during a time of rapid colonial expansion, Richard Doddridge Blackmore’s The Maid of Sker (1872) constitutes a conglomerate of fictional autobiography, historical and sensation novel. It takes the reader on a number of voyages to witness the most important British sea battles at the end of the eighteenth century. Considering the…[Read more]

Published during a time of rapid colonial expansion, Richard Doddridge Blackmore’s The Maid of Sker (1872) constitutes a conglomerate of fictional autobiography, historical and sensation novel. It takes the reader on a number of voyages to witness the most important British sea battles at the end of the eighteenth century. Considering the…[Read more]

Written around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Allen Raine’s novels and short stories predominantly depict life in a fictionalised version of the coastal area of south Cardiganshire in an unspecified but clearly Victorian past. Raine’s characters are portrayed as geographically and socially mobile as they overcome the met…[Read more]

Analogy, the comparison of one set of relations to another, was essential to Humphry Davy’s understanding of chemistry. Throughout his career, Davy used analogical reasoning to direct and to interpret his experimental analyses of the chemical reactions between substances. In his writing, he deployed analogies to organise and to explain his t…[Read more]

As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of the Gothic has had an association with fairies from its inception; even before Walpole’s 1764 Castle of Otranto (considered the first Gothic novel), eighteenth-century poetics talked of ‘the fairy kind of writing’ which, for Addison, ‘raise a pleasing kind of Horrour in the Mind of the Reader’…[Read more]

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female se…[Read more]

Oliver Twist does not find wealth and family and live happily ever after. Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam never escape the workhouse. And Eugene Wrayburn does not revive to marry Lizzie Hexam and start a new and productive life. This article takes as its starting point the idea that a story can have ‘false’ endings and uses it as a way of app…[Read more]