Socialism, sex, and the culture of aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914
"This book brings to life the growth of the socialist movement among men and women artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Britain. For these campaigners, socialism was inseparable from a desire for a new beauty of life - beauty that also, for many, required them rejecting the sexual conventions of the Victorian era." "From the early 1880s and well into the twentieth century, the efforts of these writers and activists existed in critical tension with other contemporary developments in literary culture. Livesey maps the dialogue between socialist writers like William Morris, decadent aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde, and defining figures of early modernism including Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry." "Combining extensive archival research with literary analysis, Livesey uncovers the lasting influence of socialist writers of the 1880s on the emergence of British literary modernism. And she evokes both the passions and eccentricities of the generation that believed revolution was imminent and the arts were a vital route to that future -the generation that shaped British Labour politics for the following century."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2007
Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007