Red Britain

Abstract

Red Britain provocatively situates the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 as the most definitive pretext for the cultural and political debates of the British mid-century. Drawing on new archival research and historical scholarship to investigate British responses to Soviet politics and culture, Taunton describes their conceptual, discursive, and formal reverberations in British literature and culture. The book provides new insight into writers including Arthur Koestler, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Dorothy Richardson, H. G Wells, and Raymond Williams, as well as a diverse cast of lesser-known writers, intellectuals, journalists, and visitors to the Soviet Union. As Taunton shows, the cultural resonances of the Russian Revolution are more far-reaching and various than has been acknowledged. Each of the five chapters of Red Britain takes as its subject one particular problem or debate, and explores the ways in which it was politicized as a result of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent development of the Soviet state. The chapters focus on the idea of the future; numbers and arithmetic; law and justice; debates around agriculture and landowning; and finally orality, literacy, and religion. In all of these spheres, Red Britain explores how political ideas formed in the Bolshevik revolution—futurist, utilitarian, literate, urban, statist, and economistic—clashed with and sometimes redirected, and were sometimes overwritten by, the medievalist, romantic, oral, pastoral, anarchic, and ethical emphases of English socialism.