Literature and Anarchism

Gifford, James

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_32

James Gifford³

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Abstract

Anarchism contributed conceptual, thematic, and topical contents to literature—likewise, literature contributed to anarchism as a political philosophy and practice. This chapter covers Romantic through contemporary literature emphasising English-language traditions in Europe and North America since 1790. It covers anarchist authors, such as William Godwin through to George Woodcock, as well as authors who integrated anarchist thought into literary works, like Percy Shelley, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, John Cowper Powys, Henry Miller, Herbert Read, Robert Duncan, Jackson Mac Low, and Kathy Acker. Anarchist literary movements are included distinct from individual participants, such as the New Apocalypse and the San Francisco Renaissance, as well as non-Anglophone international literary traditions. The chapter covers authors whose depictions of anarchism shaped popular consciousness, primarily Joseph Conrad and G. K. Chesterton. The chapter also covers popular genre writing, including works by Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Starhawk, and Alan Moore. How these authors, movements, and works diverge from Marxist and liberal literary traditions is discussed, including conflicts within literary criticism and literary theory. In addition to the historical relationships between anarchism and literature, the chapter considers how thematic, formal, structural, and stylistic innovations in literature relate to anarchism.

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Notes

1.
W. Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness (London: G. G. & J. Robinson, 1793).
2.
W. Godwin, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (London: B. Crosby, 1794).
3.
M. H. Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).
4.
P. B. Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy (London: Edward Moxon, 1819).
5.
P. B. Shelley, The Philosophical View of Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920).
6.
G. Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (New York: World Publishing Company, 1962).
7.
M. Wollstonecraft 1798.
8.
M. Wollstonecraft 1792.
9.
G. Woodcock, The Paradox of Oscar Wilde (New York: Macmillan, 1950).
10.
O. Wilde, ‘The picture of Dorian Gray’, Lippincott’s Magazine July (1890), 3–100.
11.
O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Victoria, BC: McPherson Library, 2011), 160.
12.
C. Lesjak, ‘Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure’, English Literary History 67 (2000), 179–204.
13.
Ibid., 180.
14.
R. Ross, Robert Ross, Friend of Friends: Letters to Robert Ross (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952).
15.
Ibid., 113.
16.
Woodcock, Oscar Wilde, 9.
17.
Ibid., 379.
18.
R. Kinna, ‘Morris, Anti-Statism and Anarchy’, in P. Faulkner and P. Preston (Eds) William Morris Centenary Essays (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 215–218.
19.
D. Goodway, ‘E. P. Thompson and William Morris’, in P. Faulkner and P. Preston (Eds) William Morris Centenary Essays (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 229–236.
20.
J. Cohn, ‘Anarchism, representation, and culture’, in J. Gifford and G. Zezulka-Mailloux (Eds) Culture + the State: Alternative Interventions (Edmonton, AB: CRC Studio, 2003), 54–63; A. Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007).
21.
D. Kadlec, ‘Pound, BLAST, and syndicalism’ English Literary History 60 (1993), 1015–1031; D. Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
22.
A. Antliff, ‘Ezra Pound, Man Ray, and Vorticism in America, 1914–1917’, in M. Antliff and S. W. Klein (Eds) Vorticism: New Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 139–155.
23.
M. Antliff, ‘Politicizing the new sculpture’, in M. Antliff and S. W. Klein (Eds) Vorticism: New Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 102–118.
24.
Kadlec, Mosaic, 13.
25.
J. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1916).
26.
J. Joyce, Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922).
27.
J. Rabaté, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
28.
Kadlec, Mosaic, 21, 96.
29.
Ibid., 116
30.
Ibid., 119.
31.
D. Goodway, ‘The politics of John Cowper Powys’, The Powys Review 15 (1984–1985), 42–52; D. Goodway, Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006).
32.
J. C. Powys, A Glastonbury Romance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1932).
33.
J. C. Powys, Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages (London: Macdonald & Company, 1951).
34.
H. Miller, Tropic of Cancer (Paris: Obelisk Press, 1934).
35.
H, Miller and H. Read, The Henry Miller-Herbert Read Letters: 1935–58 (Ann Arbor: Roger Jackson, Inc., 2007).
36.
K. Orend, ‘Fucking your way to paradise: An introduction to anarchism in the life and work of Henry Miller.” Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal 6 (2009), 44–77.
37.
J. Gifford, ‘Anarchist transformations of English surrealism: The Villa Seurat network’, Journal of Modern Literature 33 (2010), 57–71.
38.
A. Cossery, Men God Forgot (San Francisco: Circle Editions, 1946).
39.
H. Read, ‘Speech by Herbert Read at the Conway Hall.” The Surrealist Bulletin 4 (1936): 7–13; H. Read, Surrealism (London: Faber & Faber, 1936).
40.
A. Antliff, “Open form and the abstract imperative: Herbert Read and contemporary anarchist art.” Anarchist Studies 16 (2008), 6–20.
41.
A. Weaver, ‘Promoting ‘a Community of Thoughtful Men and Women’: Anarchism in Robert Duncan’s Ground Work volumes’, English Studies in Canada 34 (2008), 71–95.
42.
R. Duncan, Ground Work: Before the War (New York: New Directions, 1984); R. Duncan, Ground Work II: In the Dark (New York: New Directions, 1987).
43.
A. Cornell, Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).
44.
Ibid., 189.
45.
A. Gelpi and R. J. Bertholf, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Politics, the Politics of Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); R. Bertholf, ‘Decision at the apogee: Robert Duncan’s anarchist critique of Denise Levertov’ in A. Gelpi and R. J. Bertholf (Eds) Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Politics, the Politics of Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1–17.
46.
J. Mac Low, ‘Selections from The Stein Poems’, in Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 376–420.
47.
D. Spinosa, Anarchists in the Academy: Machines and Free Readers in Experimental Poetry (Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 2018).
48.
A. F. Redding, “Bruises, roses: Masochism and the writing of Kathy Acker.” Contemporary Literature 35 (1994), 281–304.
49.
S. Collis, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good: Poetry, Anarchy, Abstraction (Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 2007).
50.
T. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1966).
51.
G. Benton, ‘Riding the interface: An anarchist reading of Gravity’s Rainbow’, Pynchon Notes 42–43 (1998), 152–166; G. Benton, ‘Daydreams and dynamite: Anarchist strategies of resistance and paths for transformation in Against the Day’ in J. Severs and C. Leise (Eds) Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 191–214.
52.
T. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973).
53.
T. Pynchon, Against the Day (New York: Penguin, 2006).
54.
A. Roy, The God of Small Things (New York: Vintage, 1997).
55.
H. Treece, How I See Apocalypse (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1946); A. E. Salmon, Poets of the Apocalypse (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1983).
56.
D. S. Savage, The Personal Principle: Studies in Modern Poetry (Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1969).
57.
M. Peake, Titus Groan (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1946).
58.
M. Peake, ‘How a romantic novel evolved’ in S. Schimanski and H. Treece (Eds) A New Romantic Anthology (London: Grey Walls Press, 1949), 80–89.
59.
M. Peake, Gormenghast, (Gormenghast. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950).
60.
K. Rexroth, The New British Poets: An Anthology (New York: New Directions, 1947).
61.
S. Bardaouil, Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group (London: I. B. Taurus, 2016).
62.
J. Gifford, Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes (Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 2014).
63.
J. Conrad, The Secret Agent (London: Methuen & Co., 1907).
64.
H. James, The Princess Cassamassima (London: Macmillan, 1886).
65.
G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (London: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1908).
66.
J. Cohn, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006).
67.
Ibid., 130.
68.
S. Ross, ‘The secret agency of dispossession’, Études Britanniques Contemporaines 53 (2017), n.p.
69.
C. Palahniuk, Fight Club (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996).
70.
J. Gifford, A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic (Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2018).
71.
C. Miéville, ‘Introduction’ in M. Moorcock Wizardry & Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy (Austin, TX: Monkeybrain, 2004), 11–14; M. Moorcock Wizardry & Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy (Austin, TX: Monkeybrain, 2004).
72.
H. Treece, Legions of the Eagle (Oxford: Bodley Head, 1954).
73.
H. Treece, The Dark Island (London: Gollancz, 1952).
74.
H. Treece, The Golden Strangers (Oxford: Bodley Head, 1956).
75.
H. Treece, Men of the Hills (Oxford: Bodley Head, 1957).
76.
U. K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
77.
F. Jameson, ‘Magical narratives: Romance as genre’, New Literary History 7 (1975), 135–163; F. Jameson, ‘World-reduction in Le Guin: The emergence of utopian narrative’, Science Fiction Studies 2 (1975), 221–230; L. Davis, and P. Stillman, The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K.Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005); L. Call, ‘Postmodern anarchism in the novels of Ursula K. Le Guin’, SubStance 36 (2007), 87–105; T. Burns, Political Theory, Science Fiction, and Utopian Literature: Ursula K. Le Guin and The Dispossessed (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008).
78.
R. A. Heinlein, Friday (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982).
79.
R. A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966).
80.
D. G. Williams, ‘The Moons of Le Guin and Heinlein’ Science Fiction Studies, 21 (1994), 164–172.
81.
M. Moorcock, ‘Introduction’, in H. Treece Red Queen, White Queen (Manchester: Savoy Books, 1980), 1–4.
82.
Ibid., 1–4.
83.
M. Moorcock, Gloriana; or the Unfulfill’d Queen (London: Allison & Busby, 1978).
84.
M. Moore and D. Lloyd, V for Vendetta (New York: Vertigo, 2005)
85.
M. Moore, Jerusalem (London: Knockabout, 2016).
86.
D. Weir, Anarchy & Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
87.
K. S. Robinson, Red Mars (New York: Bantam, 1993); K. S. Robinson, Green Mars (New York: Bantam, 1993); K. S. Robinson, Blue Mars (New York: Bantam, 1996).
88.
Kinna, ‘Morris’, 220.
89.
G. Orwell, Inside the Whale (London: Gollancz, 1940).
90.
D. Stanford, The Freedom of Poetry: Studies in Contemporary Verse (London: Falcon Press, Ltd., 1947)
91.
D. Stanford, Inside the Forties: Literary Memoirs, 1937–1957 (London: Sedgwick & Jackson, 1977).
92.
M. Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (London: Macmillan, 1961).
93.
M. Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (London: Macmillan, 1963).
94.
E. Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (London: Poetry London, 1945).
95.
L. Durrell, Tunc (London: Faber & Faber, 1968).
96.
L. Durrell, Nunquam (London: Faber & Faber, 1970).
97.
Jameson, ‘Magical’, 77; Jameson, ‘World’, 77; F. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005).
98.
F. Jameson, Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (London: Verso, 2007), 215.
99.
A. Santesso, ‘Fascism and science fiction’, Science Fiction Studies 41 (2014), 136–162.
100.
Ibid., 154–155.
101.
S. Delany, Trouble on Triton (New York: Bantam Books, 1976).
102.
Delany ‘To Read The Dispossessed’ in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), 239–308.
103.
R. Williams, ‘Utopia and Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies 5 (1978), 203–214; D. Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, Yale University Press. 1979); R. Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981); J. Monleón, A Spectre is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); C. Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000); C. Freedman, ‘A Note on Marxism and fantasy’, Historical Materialism 10 (2002), 261–271.
104.
C. Miéville, ‘Editorial introduction’, Historical Materialism 10 (2002), 39–49; C. Miéville, ‘Afterword: Cognition as ideology: A dialectic of SF theory’ in M. Bould and C. Miéville (Eds) Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 231–248.
105.
T. May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); S. Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001); L. Call, Postmodern Anarchism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003).
106.
F. Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).

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Fairleigh Dickinson University, Vancouver, BC, Canada
James Gifford

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Department of Politics and International Relations Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK
Carl Levy
Department of Politics, History and International Relations, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK
Matthew S. Adams

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Gifford, J. (2019). Literature and Anarchism. In: Levy, C., Adams, M.S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_32

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_32
Published: 23 June 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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