@matthewtaunton
Professor of Modern Literature and Director of Research in the School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at UEA. Co-editor “‘The People‘ and British Literature” (CUP) out now. Writing “The Collective Voice” for Stanford UP. Literature & Politics.
Hardback and an affordable (but beautifully produced) paperback on the same day… it’s the latest in our Literature & Politics series from @academic.oup.com. Doug Mao and @duncanbell.bsky.social arrive at Utopia via different routes. It’s a fascinating read!
British Academy response to the Department for Education's technical consultation on the Interational Student Levy 18 February 2026 Background The Department for Education is consulting on the proposed levy on international student income, due to be introduced in England in August 2028.
‘We remain deeply concerned that universities will be unable to absorb the cost of the levy’s
introduction. The loss of cross-subsidy for domestic teaching & research will harm
universities’ ability to deliver their core functions’
Our response to the levy
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/60...
Hardback and an affordable (but beautifully produced) paperback on the same day… it’s the latest in our Literature & Politics series from @academic.oup.com. Doug Mao and @duncanbell.bsky.social arrive at Utopia via different routes. It’s a fascinating read!
Brilliant piece!
New issue of CQ has landed! “Chaplinish”, edited brilliantly by @becimay.bsky.social
@duncanbell.bsky.social and Douglas Mao, Utopia - @academic.oup.com, March 2026
global.oup.com/academic/pro...
The British Novel of Ideas: George Eliot to Zadie Smith, ed. by Rachel Potter and Matthew Taunton.
Lucky enough to find The British Novel of Ideas at a CUP sale on Friday. What a brilliant and much-needed book.
Romanticists and Long Eighteenth Centuryists — there’s an Associate Professorship (or Professorship) being advertised, a joint appointment with St Peter’s College.
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQK016/a...
NEW BOOK!
I'm very happy to say that my new book, Utopia, co-written with Douglas Mao, has been published on-line
academic.oup.com/book/62279
I'm excited to see the second book in our "Literature & Politics" series published online @academic.oup.com. Douglas Mao and @duncanbell.bsky.social take on "Utopia". It's a fascinating read. Hardback and paperback coming on 5th March. Congratulations to the authors! academic.oup.com/book/62279
Do let me know if you're interested in reviewing the book - I'm happy to help with review copies etc.
I'm excited to see the second book in our "Literature & Politics" series published online @academic.oup.com. Douglas Mao and @duncanbell.bsky.social take on "Utopia". It's a fascinating read. Hardback and paperback coming on 5th March. Congratulations to the authors! academic.oup.com/book/62279
@modernistudies.bsky.social
Deadline Extended to March 1st: CfP – The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Modernisms
We're especially looking for work on ex/decolonial modernisms, modernisms of the Global South, modernism and gender, modernism and/as archive in contemporary lit.
Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Interesting book! Let me know when you’re happy for me to assume control of the kingdom.
Never mind the jobs you had, five classes you took in college:
1) Metamorphosis from Ovid to Cronenberg
2) Stoicism
3) Intellectuals, Professionals and Museums
4) Kant’s Ethics and a Modern Economy of Evil
5) some others
❤️ London Consortium ❤️
This looks fascinating: a fading snapshot of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s beheld, briefly, in 1972 and then folded away until its reappearance in our own day. www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ja...
Stack of the book ‘In Solidarity, Under Suspicion: The British Far Left from 1956’, edited by Daniel Frost and Evan Smith
To celebrate the publication of @d-j-frost.bsky.social and mine’s book ‘In Solidarity, Under Suspicion: The British Far Left from 1956’, I am giving away a copy to one randomly chosen person who reposts this post by 11.59pm ACST Sunday 1 Feb.
manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526179593/
INCOMING: essential reading
I've written this blogpost on ICE protest chants & songs, w/ a large section of transcriptions of singing at protests by faith leaders and the Singing Resistance. It also includes songs about ICE agents' perceived masculinity issues and new songs protesting ICE. medium.com/@norikomanab...
Amazing thank you Kiron! 🙏
Help! Does anyone have access to Ian Patterson, 'Two Librettists: Montagu Slater and Ronald Duncan' in Benjamin Britten in Context, ed by Vicki P Stroeher and Justin Vickers (CUP, 2022)? Would be much appreciated.
Cover of Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton, eds, The People and British Literature: Belonging, Exclusion, and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2026).
Last page of the Contents, showing chapter 18, Devolution, Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Independence, Nick Hubble.
![However, the position Williams adopted in the 1970s was that uncompromising opposition to the current order of the sort represented by Owen in his novels missed the fundamental point that Britain was not just a struggling state but one that had already passed the point of no return in terms of its inevitable break up. This viewpoint is expressed by Lane in the novel [The Fight for Manod]:
The whole of [British] public policy […] is an attempt to reconstitute a culture, a social system, an economic order, that have in fact reached their end, reached their limits of viability. And then I sit here and look at this double inevitability: that this imperial, exporting, divided order is ending, and that all its residual social forces, all its political formations, will fight to the end to reconstruct it, to re-establish it, moving deeper all the time through crisis after crisis in an impossible attempt to regain a familiar world. So then a double inevitability: that they will fail, and that they will try nothing else.
As a prediction of what has happened politically in the UK since 1979, this cannot really be faulted. Even in 2023, both main political parties are still fighting in the face of extreme manifest decline to reconstruct their ideal versions of a British social system, rooted in deference, hierarchy and cultural conservatism, which, as we have seen from Williams’s analysis of the time, had already reached its limits of viability by the early 1960s and would have long since disappeared if devolution hadn’t been blocked for nearly 20 years following Thatcher’s victory in 1979.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:arh2itwq6f62pk3mrkdw2jpv/bafkreidlbhvfqyd4rpzvh7qdsxby66xsevjtivdakqxxjszrcakz2dbdee)
However, the position Williams adopted in the 1970s was that uncompromising opposition to the current order of the sort represented by Owen in his novels missed the fundamental point that Britain was not just a struggling state but one that had already passed the point of no return in terms of its inevitable break up. This viewpoint is expressed by Lane in the novel [The Fight for Manod]: The whole of [British] public policy […] is an attempt to reconstitute a culture, a social system, an economic order, that have in fact reached their end, reached their limits of viability. And then I sit here and look at this double inevitability: that this imperial, exporting, divided order is ending, and that all its residual social forces, all its political formations, will fight to the end to reconstruct it, to re-establish it, moving deeper all the time through crisis after crisis in an impossible attempt to regain a familiar world. So then a double inevitability: that they will fail, and that they will try nothing else. As a prediction of what has happened politically in the UK since 1979, this cannot really be faulted. Even in 2023, both main political parties are still fighting in the face of extreme manifest decline to reconstruct their ideal versions of a British social system, rooted in deference, hierarchy and cultural conservatism, which, as we have seen from Williams’s analysis of the time, had already reached its limits of viability by the early 1960s and would have long since disappeared if devolution hadn’t been blocked for nearly 20 years following Thatcher’s victory in 1979.
Chapter 18. Devolution, Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Independence. Nick Hubble. The Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935 adopted the strategy of the Popular Front as an anti-fascist organisational technique combining a united front of working-class organisations with a wider popular alliance including socialists, social democrats, liberal and even moderate conservatives. In practice, such alliances were organised at a national level and resulted in 1936 in the election of Popular Front governments in both France and Spain. As Elinor Taylor has shown, Popular Front politics in Britain gave rise in the second half of the 1930s to an extraordinary set of realist novels, which ‘functioned as a site of negotiation for the imaginative making of a politics’. In many ways, the most exemplary of these novels was Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy (1937), written by a Welsh Communist miner, who was actually present as a delegate at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern for Georgi Dimitrov’s speech announcing the national focus of the Popular Front, in close collaboration with Communist intellectual Douglas Garman for the party publisher, Lawrence & Wishart. The novel is not just an epic tale of strikes and collective political action but, in the words of Jones himself, ‘a class book in the fullest sense of the word’ which deals with ‘every phase of human existence from within the community’. Randall Swingler, writing about Cwmardy and its sequel We Live in the Daily Worker, suggested that together they could be read as ‘a sort of parable of the whole development of the working class in England’. While Taylor notes Swingler’s ‘elision of “England” and “Britain”’, she supports his argument that the novel’s investment in popular life allows it to provide ‘a glorious affirmation of the people who made this book’. But the question of the exact national identity of these people remains unsettled.
Delighted to receive my contributor copy of Benjamin Kohlmann and Matt Taunton's 'The People' and British Literature. Although the book ended up a bit delayed, I think it's very timely for the state of play in 2026 Britain. My chapter, Devolution, Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Independence ... 1/-
Great to see this special issue on paper, er, on paper!
I chair the acquisitions meeting of @reaktionbooks.bsky.social, an independent publisher. We're open to unsolicited book proposals: history, art, music, film, food, animal studies and any great indefinable non-fiction book ideas you might have. Check out the list and get in touch.
Back in the coolest library
Amazing wrongness here.
1. If you're arresting 00s of peaceful pro-Gazan protestors, you don't believe in free speech.
2. Even if you do believe in it, it doesn't extend to child porn.
3. You can't debate with fascists.
4. You can put a counter-narrative (if you have one) onto civilized platforms.
