Literature, Journalism and Liberal Culture, 1886-1916 Politics and Letters

Literature, Journalism and Liberal Culture, 1886-1916 explores the ways in which the vocabularies of advanced or 'new' liberalism permeated English literary cultural discourse from the late 1880s to World War One. Drawing on a wide range of autobiographical and biographical material, this book reconstructs an extensive network of advanced liberal journalists, men of letters, and political theorists associated with key organs of the daily and weekly press, and demonstrates for the first time the network's importance in the literary cultural world at the turn of the century. Until now, liberalism's place in that world has been understood as something of a residual Victorianism. Through a careful analysis of essays and book reviews published primarily in the liberal press, the author traces out a set of cultural vocabularies related to but quite distinct from classic Victorian liberalism, revealing a much closer and more complex relation to the vocabularies of an emerging modernist culture.

Jock Macleod is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Griffith University, Australia. He is currently editor of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies.

Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Advanced Liberalism, Journalism, and Literary Culture
2. Between Literature and Politics: The Massingham Network and the Institutions of Advanced Liberalism
3. The 'Self-Conscious Evolution of Humanity': Advanced Liberalism and the Politics and Culture of 'Life'
4. Advanced Liberalism and the Cultural Value of 'Life': Ethics, Aesthetics, and Political Economy
5. Writing the East End: Advanced Liberalism, Realism and Social Reform
6. Contesting the New: Advanced Liberalism and the Emergence of Modernism
7. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index