Socialist Imaginations: Utopias, Myths, And The Masses

Description

This volume offers new perspectives on the appeal and profound cultural meaning of socialism over the past two centuries. It brings together scholarship from various disciplines addressing diverse national contexts, including Britain, China, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the USA. Taken together, the contributions highlight the aesthetic, narrative, and religious dimensions of socialism as it has developed through three broad phases in the modern era: early nineteenth-century beginnings, mass-based political organizations, and the attainment of state power in the twentieth century and beyond. Socialism did not attract millions of people primarily because of logical argument and empirical evidence, important though those were. Rather, it told the most compelling story about the past, present, and future. Refocusing attention on socialism's imaginative dimensions, this volume aims to revive scholarly interest in one of the modern world¹s most important political orientations. Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 List of figures......Page 8 List of contributors......Page 9 Acknowledgements......Page 12 Introduction: socialist imaginations......Page 14 PART I The nineteenth-century socialist future......Page 32 1 Contested Christianities: communism and religion in July Monarchy France......Page 34 2 Religious dreams of a socialist future: the case of Owenism......Page 54 3 Beyond the ‘grand designs’: Owenism, architecture, and utopia......Page 75 PART II Ideals for the working-class movement......Page 104 4 “If that is Socialism, we won’t help its advent”: the impact of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward on socialist thought in late-nineteenth-century Western Europe......Page 106 5 Christian philanthropy, or political class struggle? Imaginations of Socialism and Christianity in Swedish prose fiction of the early 1900s......Page 129 6 ‘The omnipotence of spring’: ideas of progress in Norwegian socialism before 1940......Page 180 PART III The imagination of socialism in power......Page 208 7 Imaginations of insecurity: representations of the State Security Service in East German television in the late 1960s and 1970s......Page 210 8 Frugal deaths: socialist imaginations of death and funerals in modern China......Page 234 9 Xi Jinping’s China: keeping the imagination alive under socialism in power......Page 257 Afterword: socialist cultures and sociabilities......Page 278 Index......Page 292