Writing and Democracy

Wim Neetens sets his discussion of working-class fiction and feminist and socialist writing within a wider theorization of the "cultural revolution" that transformed and modernized late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The focus is on the ways in which literary voices positioned themselves in relation to processes of political and cultural democratization. Walter Besant's hopeful but naive humanism, George Gissing's punitive naturalism and Henry James's evasive psychologism are contrasted with the more radical voices and visions emerging from the Women's Movement - Sarah Grand and Elizabeth Robins - and from Socialism - William Morris, G.B. Shaw and Robert Tressell. Neetens engages with theories of colonial discourse as well as with recent developments in socialist and feminist criticism in examining the diversity of literary responses to social and cultural change.