Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T15:06:35.379Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Postscript: 1976”: E. P. Thompson and the River of Fire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2019

Kent Puckett
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This new section of Victorian Literature and Culture focuses on apparently minor works of criticism, works that have fallen out of view but that might deserve another look. I want to talk about an almost aggressively minor instance of very Victorian scholarship, minor not only because it isn't often read but also because minorness is built into its very design: E. P. Thompson's “Postscript: 1976,” a longish essay that followed the second and revised edition of his 1955 biography, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. When seen in the reciprocal contexts of Thompson's career and the story of the British left (when, in other words, theory is seen not as opposed to but rather as a part of history), the apparently minor and belated qualities of Thompson's postscript emerge as a source of critical and even utopian promise. I want to argue that Thompson's lifelong engagement with the life of William Morris and with Morris's late conversion to socialism led him to a powerful and counterintuitive account of the lived threshold (what he and Morris call the “river of fire”) as essential to the methods of history and historical materialism.

Type
Defamiliarizations
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , Winter 2019 , pp. 813 - 834
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Many thanks to Rachel Ablow, Dan Blanton, Eric Bulson, Amanda Goldstein, Danny Hack, Daniel Simon, and Kara Wittman for their help with this essay.

References

Works Cited

Abensour, Miguel. “William Morris: The Politics of Romance.” In Revolutionary Romanticism: A Drunken Boat Anthology, edited by Blechman, Max, 125–63. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1999.Google Scholar
Althusser, Louis. For Marx. London: Verso Books, 1969.Google Scholar
Anderson, Perry. Arguments within English Marxism. London: Verso Books, 1980.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Erich. Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Austen, Jane. Emma. 1815. London: Penguin Classics, 1996.Google Scholar
Balzac, Honoré de. Père Goriot. 1835. Trans. Krailsheimer, A. J.. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. “Utopias.” In “The ‘Scandal’ of Marxism” and Other Writings on Politics, edited and translated by Turner, Chris, 105–7. London: Seagull Books, 2015.Google Scholar
Collini, Stefan. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Fehér, Ferenc, and Heller, Agnes. Hungary 1956 Revisited: The Message of a Revolution—a Quarter of a Century After. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983.Google Scholar
Goode, John. “E. P. Thompson and ‘The Significance of Literature.’” In E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, edited by Kaye, Harvey J. and McClelland, Keith, 183–203. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric. “The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party.” In Rebels and Their Causes, edited by Cornforth, M., 21–48. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso Books, 2007.Google Scholar
Kaye, Harvey J. British Marxist Historians. Oxford: Polity Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Lefort, Claude. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.Google Scholar
Lessing, Doris. Walking in the Shade: 1949 to 1962. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997.Google Scholar
Morris, William. News from Nowhere. 1890. London: Routledge, 2012.Google Scholar
Plotz, John. Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Puckett, Kent. “Hardy's 1900.” Modern Language Quarterly 75, no. 1 (2014): 57–75.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. “The Communism of William Morris.” In E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics, edited by Winslow, Cal, 249–62. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. “A Letter to America.” In Protest and Survive: Stop Nuclear War, edited by Thompson, E. P. and Smith, Dan, 3–54. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. “The Peculiarities of the English.” In The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, edited by Thompson, E. P., 245–301. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. The Poverty of Theory. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. “Through the Smoke of Budapest.” In E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics, edited by Winslow, Cal, 37–49. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. “William Morris and the Moral Issues Today.” Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1951/william-morris.htm.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. Pontypool, Wales: Merlin Press, 2013.Google Scholar