Table of Contents

Introduction: A Socialist Century
1: Society is a Simple and Beautiful Science": Aesthetics and Anti-Politics in Robert Owen's Socialism
2: Poetic Vanguardism and Political Violence in Capel Lofft's "Chartist Epic"
3: Self-Consuming Socialism: Affect, Ideology, and Aesthetics in the Christian Socialist Movement
4: Utopian Socialism, Women's Emancipation, and the Origins of Middlemarch
5: "What is to Come After This?": William Morris, News from Nowhere, and the Aesthetics of Fin-de-Siècle Socialism
Epilogue: The Party Fight

About the Author

Mark A. Allison is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he is also Co-Director of the University Honors Program. His work has appeared in English Literary History (ELH), Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Utopian Studies, among other venues. He is currently working on Anglophone utopian literature in the long nineteenth century, as well as projects concerning socialist, radical, and communitarian authors.

Reviews

Imagining Socialism is especially skilled at drawing out a text's constitutive tensions, showing them to reflect larger contradictions within the socialist formations they engage.
*Wanne Mendonck, Cambridge Quarterly *

In Imagining Socialism, Mark A. Allison takes as his subject the entanglement of nineteenth-century British socialism with artistic, literary, and other aesthetic endeavours. This is by no means a new project: Ian Britain, Ruth Livesey, Diana Maltz and Chris Waters, among others, have noted the central role aesthetics played in late nineteenth-century socialist circles. What makes Allison's Imagining Socialism unique, however, is its association of the creative and artistic socialism that emerged towards the end of the century ...
*Sophie Thompson, CHASE-funded PhD researcher at the University of Kent, Romance, Revolution, and Reform*

Mark Allison's detailed, comprehensive, and engaging study Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-Politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817-1918 is relatively novel in delineating the contours of a coherent tradition that is bookended.
*Owen Holland, Utopian Studies*