Radical disaffection: political pessimism in fin-de-siècle British fiction

This dissertation argues that the uniquely pessimistic dimensions of radical politics in late nineteenth-century Britain formed an unlikely source of aesthetic innovation in the realist novel. Whereas the late-Victorian revival of radical politics is more often remembered for its utopian optimism and avant-garde forms, I focus instead on the counterintuitively negative tactics upon which that political culture relied, tracing the ways in which activists and artists took up a bleak gradualism at odds with revolutionary ideals. The project proposes that disaffection – a pessimistic structure of feeling that includes frustration, cynicism, and disappointment – unites what might initially appear to be disparate political and aesthetic strategies across turn-of-the-century radical movements for class and gender equality. Moreover, it situates the fin-de-siècle realist novel, over and above the era’s overtly propagandistic and sensationalist genres, as the primary discursive arena in which that pessimism was theorized and worked through. Taking up works by William Morris, George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Olive Schreiner, Sarah Grand, and Thomas Hardy, I argue that the novel of political disaffection was centrally relevant to turn-of-the-century radical discourse. These texts encapsulate the paradoxical mood of contemporary radical movements, highlighting the friction between ideological principle and activist praxis that energized those movements even as it undercut their aims. They also demonstrate the surprising aesthetic productivity of radical pessimism, suggesting that it was radicalism’s imaginative limitations, rather than its visionary idealism, that inspired British novelists to experiment with modernist technique. Across chapters about socialist, anarchist, feminist, and free love fiction, Radical Disaffection traces the ways in which British radical pessimism shaped late-century activists’ strategic mobilization of revolutionary sentiment toward the gradual expansion of political, discursive, and aesthetic forms in an era of progressive reform.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference