'To Hell with Culture': Anarchism in Twentieth-Century British Literature

225 Pages·2005·1.06 MB·English

by  Gustav Klaus

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‘To Hell with Culture’
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‘To Hell with Culture’
Anarchism and Twentieth-Century
British Literature
Edited by
H. G K S K
USTAV LAUSAND TEPHEN NIGHT
UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS
CARDIFF
2005
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© The Contributors, 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without clearance from
the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place,
Cardiff, CF10 4UP.
www.wales.ac.uk/press
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-7083-1898-3
The right of the Contributors to be identified separately as authors of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with Sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publishers wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Higher
Education Funding Council for Wales in the publication of this book.
Printed in Wales by Dinefwr Press, Llandybïe
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Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Acknowledgements x
1. Introduction
H. GUSTAV KLAUSand STEPHEN KNIGHT 1
2. Conrad and Anarchism: Irony, Solidarity and Betrayal
JOHN RIGNALL 11
3. Identifying Anarchy in G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who
Was Thursday
HEATHER WORTHINGTON 21
4. Art for Politics’ Sake: The Sardonic Principle of
James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon)
WILLIAM K. MALCOLM 35
5. Anarcho-syndicalism in Welsh Fiction in English
STEPHEN KNIGHT 51
6. Ralph Bates and the Representation of the Spanish Anarchists
in Lean Menand The Olive Field
RAIMUND SCHÄFFNER 66
7. Ethel Mannin’s Fiction and the Influence of Emma Goldman
KATHLEEN BELL 82
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CONTENTS
8. Herbert Read and the Anarchist Aesthetic
PAUL GIBBARD 97
9. Aldous Huxley and Alex Comfort: A Comparison
DAVID GOODWAY 111
10. John Cowper Powys and Anarchism
VICTOR GOLIGHTLY 126
11. Litvinoff’s Room: East End Anarchism
VALENTINE CUNNINGHAM 141
12. Anti-authoritarianism in the Later Fiction of James Kelman
H. GUSTAV KLAUS 162
13. Pimps, Punks and Pub Crooners: Anarchy and Anarchism in
Contemporary Welsh Fiction
KATIE GRAMICH 178
14. Lifestyle Anarchism and its Discontents: Mark Ravenhill,
Enda Walsh and the Politics of Contemporary Drama
CHRISTIAN SCHMITT-KILB 194
Index 208
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Notes on Contributors
Kathleen Bellis a Senior Lecturer at De Montfort University, where she teaches
twentieth-century literature. Her publications are chiefly on twentieth-century
poetry and popular fiction.
Valentine Cunninghamis Professor of English Language and Literature at
the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in English at Corpus Christi
College, Oxford. He has written extensively about Victorian literature, the
Thirties, Spanish Civil War writing and literary theory. His most recent book
is The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics.
Paul Gibbardis Research Editor for the Complete Works of Voltaire at the
Voltaire Foundation, Oxford. He wrote his doctoral thesis on anarchism in
English and French writing of the fin de siècle.
Victor Golightlylectures in English at Trinity College, Carmarthen, and is a
past editor of New Welsh Review. He has recently completed a Ph.D. thesis
at the University of Wales Swansea, on the modernism of W. B. Yeats,
Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins. His paper ‘Writing with Dreams and
Blood: Dylan Thomas, Marxism and 1930s Swansea’ was published in
Welsh Writing in Englishin 2003.
David Goodway is Senior Lecturer in History, School of Continuing
Education, University of Leeds. He is the author of London Chartism,
1838–1848 and (with Colin Ward) Talking Anarchy, and has edited For
Anarchism(in the History Workshop Series) and Herbert Read Reassessed,
as well as collections of the political writings of Read, Comfort and Maurice
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viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Brinton. He is currently completing a book on anarchism and British writers
since c.1880, in which there will be chapters on both Huxley and Comfort.
Katie Gramich is Senior Lecturer in English at Bath Spa University
College. A graduate of the universities of Wales, London and Alberta, she has
research interests in Welsh cultural studies, women’s writing, post-colonial
and twentieth-century literature. Recent publications include editions of The
Rebecca Rioterby Amy Dillwyn and Queen of the Rushesby ‘Allen Raine’
and a bilingual anthology of Welsh Women’s Poetry, 1460–2001.
H. Gustav Klaus is Professor of the Literature of the British Isles at the
University of Rostock. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-
century working-class writing. His most recent monographs are Factory Girl
(1998) and James Kelman(2005). With Stephen Knight he has co-edited The
Art of Murder(1998) and British Industrial Fictions(2000).
Stephen Knightis a Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University.
He has written widely on medieval and modern literature, recently publishing
books on Robin Hood and crime fiction. He has a special interest in Welsh
literature in English and his most recent book is One Hundred Years of
Fiction (2004) in the ‘Writing Wales in English’ series.
William K. Malcolmhas spent a quarter of a century engaged in research on
James Leslie Mitchell. His doctoral thesis from the University of Aberdeen
was published in 1984 as A Blasphemer & Reformer: A Study of James
Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon. A director of the Grassic Gibbon
Centre at Arbuthnott, he edits the Centre’s newsletter, The Speak of the
Place.He has recently finished editing a miscellany of Mitchell’s uncollected
writings, including correspondence, notebooks, essays and manuscripts.
John Rignall is Reader in the Department of English at the University of
Warwick. He has published widely on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
fiction, his titles including Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator(1992),
anedited collection of essays, George Eliot and Europe(1997), and the Oxford
Reader’s Companion to George Eliot (2000), of which he was the general
editor.
Raimund Schäffner teaches English Literature at the University of
Heidelberg. He has published two books, Politik und Drama bei David
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
Edgarand Anarchismus und Literatur in England, as well as many articles
on contemporary British political drama, English poetry and prose writing
since the seventeenth century and post-colonial literature.
Christian Schmitt-Kilb is lecturer in English Literature at the University
of Rostock. His research interests include English literature and culture in
the sixteenth century as well as twentieth-century British fiction and drama.
His study ‘Never was the Albion Nation without Poetrie’: Poetik, Rhetorik
und Nation im England der frühen Neuzeitwas published in 2004.
Heather Worthington is a lecturer in English at Cardiff University. Her
research has focused on crime fiction in the nineteenth century and her book
on The Rise of the Detective: Crime Fiction in Early Nineteenth Century
Popular Fiction, will be published in 2005.