“Towards a Literary Prehistory of the Welfare State: Writing in a Reformist Mode, 1880-1910”

“Towards a Literary Prehistory of the Welfare State: Writing in a Reformist Mode, 1880-1910”:

This paper outlines a literary prehistory of the welfare state through readings of works by Edward Carpenter, H. G. Wells, and E. M. Forster. By focusing on the slow politics of reform, Kohlmann foregrounds a temporality of institutional change – and a mode of literary writing – that differs from the aesthetics and politics of rupture more commonly associated with the experience of modernity. The paper locates the works of Carpenter, Wells, and Forster in relation to particular moments and movements of reform, including debates about land nationalization, progressive taxation, and unemployment insurance. Building on these site-specific case studies, Kohlmann argues that literature written in the ‘reformist literary mode’ imagines the emerging institutional structures of the welfare state as deeply connected to the fabric of social life rather than as an ensemble of bureaucratic processes located outside it or detached from it. According to the reformist literary mode that crystallizes around 1900, the state isn’t just an entity to which we adjust ourselves – an institutional reality to which we reluctantly become habituated – but something that allows us to think in meaningful ways about the ends of collective life. By presenting the contours of the welfare state as an embodiment of shared ends, the works explored here also provide critical leverage on current theorizations of the welfare state in literary studies. As the late historian Tony Judt urged in Ill Fares the Land (2011): “[w]e need to learn to think the state again: we need to frame it in a language of ends, not means”. Taking up Judt’s cue, the paper will explore the resources which turn-of-the-century reformism provides for more compelling defenses of the welfare state today. 

 Speaker’s  Biography

Benjamin Kohlmann is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He has held postdoctoral and visiting positions at Columbia University, at the University of East Anglia, and at Jesus College, Cambridge. In Spring 2018 he will be a visiting fellow at the University of California at Davis. He is the author of Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature of the 1930s (published by Oxford University Press in 2014) and the editor of four volumes, including A History of 1930s British Literature (with Dr. Matthew Taunton from UEA, forthcoming from Cambridge UP in 2018); Literatures of Anti-Communism (with Dr. Matthew Taunton, as a special issue of Literature and History 2015); Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain (London: Ashgate, 2013); and Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture, 1885-1945 (London: Palgrave, 2012). In addition, he has published nine articles on late-Victorian, Edwardian, and modernist literature in prestigious venues such as History of Political Economy, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Textual Practice, PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, English Literary History, Review of English Studies, and Modern Language Notes. He has also contributed multiple essays to various edited collections such as The Cambridge Companion to British Literature in the 1930s (Cambridge UP, 2017), Late Victorian into Modern, 1880-1920 (Oxford UP, 2016), and The American Isherwood (U of Minnesota P, 2015). 

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