Matthew Taunton
Biographic Data
| ID | 1484481 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Taunton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Taunton |
| SIGNATURE | TAUNTON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of East Anglia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9764-7809 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
'The People' and British Literature
Why do invocations of 'the people' carry such force in current political discourse and public debate? This book offers an ambitiously transhistorical account of the ways that 'the people' has figured in British literature and culture. Ranging from the later mediaeval period to the present, the twenty-three chapters draw on substantial new research to show that the figure of the people has been put to reactionary and progressive ends and that its …
Politics, Letters and the Novel of Ideas
[T]here is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode.1 Lessing was right. British literary culture, and above all the influential taste-making apparatus of our discipline which had become institu…
Cold War Decolonization
Literary culture after 1945 took shape in a context where a handful of colonial empires were replaced by (at present count) nearly two hundred sovereign nation-states whose domestic politics, foreign policy, and cultural life were profoundly shaped by their relationship to the Cold War superpowers. One of the striking features of the historiography of this post-1945 world is that its two most salient themes—the Cold War, and decolonization—have s…
Their ideas are imprisoned in action”
The 1930s
Notes1 I have assembled an extensive, annotated bibliography of scholarship on the 1930s, which may be useful for readers who are studying this period. See Taunton.2 See Kohlmann and Taunton, Mellor and Salton-Cox, and Hubble’s persuasive account of proletarian literature
The London Consortium and Me
Like many Consortiumites of my generation, I joined the London Consortium under the spell of Steve Connor. I made my way down Malet Street from UCL, where I was studying for an MA in English Literature, to Steve’s office in Birkbeck College. It was Jane Lewty who had pointed me in Steve’s direction. ‘He’s a sound guy’, she said. I only later realised that she was referring to his interest in sound studies, but the warmth of her recommendation had…
Katharine Burdekin and Collective Speech
(2020). Katharine Burdekin and Collective Speech: Politics, Chorus and Liturgy. Women: a cultural review: Vol. 31, THE INTERWAR WOMAN WRITER: POLITICS AND AESTHETICS. Guest-edited by Clara Jones and Natasha Periyan, pp. 384-400
Critical Quarterly , Leavisism, and UEA
This article explores the origins of Critical Quarterly, situating it in relation to Leavisite ideas that were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that CQ presented a modified version of the Leavisite project, stressing (against Leavis) the continued vitality of contemporary culture, and seeking to expand the readership for informed literary criticism beyond the walls of the university. This democratising mission was to some extent shared…
CFP
Summary of the Anglo-Russian Research Network (ARRN)
The Anglo-Russian Research Network (ARRN) was founded in 2011 by Rebecca Beasley (Queen’s College, Oxford) and Matthew Taunton (UEA) to bring together those with an interest in cultural and intelle
The politics of number in writing about the Soviet Union
Why did British writers, when they wrote about the Soviet Union, often deploy the imagery of numbers, arithmetic and mathematics? This paper scrutinises a number of such instances, including Orwell's famous use of the equation ‘2 + 2 = 5’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Koestler's fascination with Euclid's proof of the infinitude of prime numbers in The Invisible Writing. These are put into relation with less celebrated works where questions of numbe…
Russia and the British Intellectuals
When H.G. Wells published an interview with Stalin in the New Statesman in 1934 a controversy resulted, and two other leading intellectuals of the day–George Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes–were invited to respond in a subsequent issue of the journal. This chapter explores the contested position of the Soviet Union in the imaginations of the British intelligentsia in the 1930s by focusing on the attitudes of these writers, contrasting their …
Cottage economy or collective farm? E nglish socialism and agriculture between M errie E ngland and the F ive‐ Y ear P lan
The cottage economy and the collective farm are two alternative models of socialist agriculture that relate broadly to the traditions of R omantic and utilitarian socialism and embody diametrically opposed attitudes to food and its production. In the decades following the R ussian R evolution of 1917 – at a time when collectivised agriculture was being implemented on a previously unimaginable scale, with disastrous consequences – the case for suc…
No prominent works on this page.
Cottage economy or collective farm? E nglish socialism and agriculture between M errie E ngland and the F ive‐ Y ear P lan
The cottage economy and the collective farm are two alternative models of socialist agriculture that relate broadly to the traditions of R omantic and utilitarian socialism and embody diametrically opposed attitudes to food and its production. In the decades following the R ussian R evolution of 1917 – at a time when collectivised agriculture was being implemented on a previously unimaginable scale, with disastrous consequences – the case for suc…
Russia and the British Intellectuals
When H.G. Wells published an interview with Stalin in the New Statesman in 1934 a controversy resulted, and two other leading intellectuals of the day–George Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes–were invited to respond in a subsequent issue of the journal. This chapter explores the contested position of the Soviet Union in the imaginations of the British intelligentsia in the 1930s by focusing on the attitudes of these writers, contrasting their …
The politics of number in writing about the Soviet Union
Why did British writers, when they wrote about the Soviet Union, often deploy the imagery of numbers, arithmetic and mathematics? This paper scrutinises a number of such instances, including Orwell's famous use of the equation ‘2 + 2 = 5’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Koestler's fascination with Euclid's proof of the infinitude of prime numbers in The Invisible Writing. These are put into relation with less celebrated works where questions of numbe…
Summary of the Anglo-Russian Research Network (ARRN)
The Anglo-Russian Research Network (ARRN) was founded in 2011 by Rebecca Beasley (Queen’s College, Oxford) and Matthew Taunton (UEA) to bring together those with an interest in cultural and intelle
Critical Quarterly , Leavisism, and UEA
This article explores the origins of Critical Quarterly, situating it in relation to Leavisite ideas that were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that CQ presented a modified version of the Leavisite project, stressing (against Leavis) the continued vitality of contemporary culture, and seeking to expand the readership for informed literary criticism beyond the walls of the university. This democratising mission was to some extent shared…
CFP
Katharine Burdekin and Collective Speech
(2020). Katharine Burdekin and Collective Speech: Politics, Chorus and Liturgy. Women: a cultural review: Vol. 31, THE INTERWAR WOMAN WRITER: POLITICS AND AESTHETICS. Guest-edited by Clara Jones and Natasha Periyan, pp. 384-400
The London Consortium and Me
Like many Consortiumites of my generation, I joined the London Consortium under the spell of Steve Connor. I made my way down Malet Street from UCL, where I was studying for an MA in English Literature, to Steve’s office in Birkbeck College. It was Jane Lewty who had pointed me in Steve’s direction. ‘He’s a sound guy’, she said. I only later realised that she was referring to his interest in sound studies, but the warmth of her recommendation had…
Politics, Letters and the Novel of Ideas
[T]here is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode.1 Lessing was right. British literary culture, and above all the influential taste-making apparatus of our discipline which had become institu…
Cold War Decolonization
Literary culture after 1945 took shape in a context where a handful of colonial empires were replaced by (at present count) nearly two hundred sovereign nation-states whose domestic politics, foreign policy, and cultural life were profoundly shaped by their relationship to the Cold War superpowers. One of the striking features of the historiography of this post-1945 world is that its two most salient themes—the Cold War, and decolonization—have s…
Their ideas are imprisoned in action”
The 1930s
Notes1 I have assembled an extensive, annotated bibliography of scholarship on the 1930s, which may be useful for readers who are studying this period. See Taunton.2 See Kohlmann and Taunton, Mellor and Salton-Cox, and Hubble’s persuasive account of proletarian literature
'The People' and British Literature
Why do invocations of 'the people' carry such force in current political discourse and public debate? This book offers an ambitiously transhistorical account of the ways that 'the people' has figured in British literature and culture. Ranging from the later mediaeval period to the present, the twenty-three chapters draw on substantial new research to show that the figure of the people has been put to reactionary and progressive ends and that its …
History (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Political science (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · History (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Art history (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works)