Literature, Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism : Politics and Letters, 1886-1916

This book examines the impact of the new liberalism on English literary discourse from the fin-de-siècle to World War One. It maps out an extensive network of journalists, men of letters and political theorists, showing how their shared political and literary vocabularies offer new readings of liberalism's relation to an emerging modernist culture.

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.