Red Britain

<em>Red Britain</em> sets out a provocative rethinking of the cultural politics of mid-century Britain by drawing attention to the extent diversity and longevity of the cultural effects of the Russian Revolution. Drawing on new archival research and historical scholarship this book explores the conceptual discursive and formal reverberations of the Bolshevik Revolution in British literature and culture. It provides new insight into canonical writers including Doris Lessing George Orwell Dorothy Richardson H.G Wells and Raymond Williams as well bringing to attention a cast of less-studied writers intellectuals journalists and visitors to the Soviet Union. <p/><em>Red Britain</em> shows that the cultural resonances of the Russian Revolution are more far-reaching and various than has previously been acknowledged. Each of the five chapters takes as its subject one particular problem or debate and investigates the ways in which it was politicised 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 <em>Red Britain</em> shows how the medievalist romantic oral pastoral anarchic and ethical emphases of English socialism clashed with and were sometimes overwritten by futurist utilitarian literate urban statist and economistic ideas associated with the Bolshevik Revolution.<br>