Suchergebnisse

Preface: whatever happened to realism? -- Introduction: only connect globalisation and the problem of realism -- Methodological problems of the strike novel: the case of gb84 -- "Edging back into awareness": realisms of the globalised city -- Regeneration: the historical novel after postmodernism -- Maurice Gee's marginal realism -- Conclusion: realism in the valley of its saying

Introduction
Dougal McNeill is a Senior Lecturer, School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies
Shintaro Kono is an Associate Professor at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo.
Alistair Murray is a graduate student in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.

Reading Harry Holland's literary works as an integral part of his political project and vision, this essay argues that greater attention be paid to the dissident, radical and revolutionary socialist currents shaping Labour's thought world in the pre-1935 period. Holland's socialist project, and its ambitions to shape new kinds of political subjects, had, I suggest, a wider resonance and is of greater contemporary interest than most historians have allowed. His poetry and literary works need restored to scholarly and political attention.

Reading Harry Holland's literary works as an integral part of his political project and vision, this essay argues that greater attention be paid to the dissident, radical and revolutionary socialist currents shaping Labour's thought world in the pre-1935 period. Holland's socialist project, and its ambitions to shape new kinds of political subjects, had, I suggest, a wider resonance and is of greater contemporary interest than most historians have allowed. His poetry and literary works need restored to scholarly and political attention.

As this essay concerns itself with missed chances, an appropriate image with which to open proceedings: what could Adorno and Mulgan have talked about on their train journey from Paris to Dieppe? Mulgan was returning from a failed League of Nationsl meeting; Europe was travelling towards Serge's 'midnight of the century. A wear dispiritedness characterizes both thinkers' correspondence from the time.

Documenting the publication of poetry in The Maoriland Worker, this essay considers the place of poetry and poetics in the Worker's history and its political project. What was the place of literature in the early years of the New Zealand labour movement? What sorts of texts circulated, and how were they received and interpreted by socialist journalists and critics? Combining quantitative analysis with close reading, this essay offers the Worker as a case study in early New Zealand labour movement literary culture.Correspondence about this article may be directed to Dougal McNeill at Dougal.McNeill@vuw.ac.nz

"Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact."[i]Williams's famous phrase may, in the hands of his latter-day epigones in a depoliticised institutional Cultural Studies, have been turned towards justifications for the study of and accommodation to what is, but, in its originating New Left moment, this was always an assertion of what might be. Ordinary culture, and the cultures of ordinary people, were conceived, by Williams and his collaborators, as part of "a genuine revolution, transforming [people] and institutions; continually extended and deepened by the actions of millions, continually and variously opposed by explicit reaction and by the pressure of habitual forms and ideas."[ii] Williams wrote, thought, and organised across his varied career as a socialist intellectual and activist, offering resources of hope and strategic reflections on how cultural work might contribute to the anti-capitalist project of working-class self-organisation and social transformation. That project, difficult enough in the post-war period of his own life and all the more urgent and complex in its conception in our own, the era of Trumpian reaction and ecological collapse, demanded that committed intellectuals parse the "dominant" culture—the culture of capital—for signs of the "emergent," the collectivity to come, and traces of the "residual," habits, products and processes from previous class societies carried over into, and deployed, in capitalist cultures.[iii] Dominant, residual and emergent were terms Williams used to map the complex and internally contradictory work of culture in class society, and to trace some of its tears, cracks and openings. The vocabulary he bequeathed us, from "structures of feeling" to "long revolution," has a rich relevance for the rickety and crisis-prone world we find ourselves in now, after the holograms of post-modernism have ceased to be projected but before newly-coherent ruling-class images and narratives have formed. There are signs, in everything from Social Reproduction Theory to the so-called Affective Turn, of a Williams revival amongst committed intellectuals today.[iv] Materialist criticism has returned for our bad new days.
[i] Raymond Williams, "Culture is Ordinary," in Conviction, ed. Norman MacKenzie (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1958), 75.
[ii] Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Penguin, 1961), 10.
[iii] See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–28.
[iv] See, inter alia, Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory (London: Pluto, 2016), an exhilaratingly revisionist socialist-feminist text studded with Williams references and asides; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), chapter two; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), and Jennifer Lawn, Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand 1984–2008: Market Fictions (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). An extended review of Lawn's text by Shintaro Kono will appear in the next issue of this journal.