Elizabeth Carolyn
Miller
This book explores the literary culture of Britain's radical
press from 1880 to 1910, a time that saw a flourishing of radical political
activity as well as the emergence of a mass print industry. While Enlightenment
radicals and their heirs had seen free print as an agent of revolutionary
transformation, socialist, anarchist and other radicals of this later period
suspected that a mass public could not exist outside the capitalist system. In
response, they purposely reduced the scale of print by appealing to a small,
counter-cultural audience. "Slow print," like "slow food"
today, actively resisted industrial production and the commercialization of new
domains of life.
Drawing on under-studied periodicals and archives, this book
uncovers a largely forgotten literary-political context. It looks at the
extensive debate within the radical press over how to situate radical values
within an evolving media ecology, debates that engaged some of the most famous
writers of the era (William Morris and George Bernard Shaw), a host of
lesser-known figures (theosophical socialist and birth control reformer Annie
Besant, gay rights pioneer Edward Carpenter, and proto-modernist editor Alfred
Orage), and countless anonymous others.
Buy at Stanford UP.
