It is a commonplace in discussions of Anne Lister to identify her as a self-proclaimed Tory, and eventually a Tory landowner. But the Lister of the diaries also fancied herself a Rousseauvian individualist and something of a Byronic hero, a champion of Romantic individualism that sits somewhat oddly with her sense of social entitlement. I have argued elsewhere that Lister’s conservatism may have been compensatory, a form of normalisation and possibly of protection. In this chapter I complicate those arguments by looking more closely and more broadly at Lister’s politics - and politics with both a capital and a small ’p’. Lister lived during an age of revolution and reaction, of Napoleonic wars, of abolitionist agitation, of the first major Reform Act, of colonial expansion, of early industrialisation and rail travel. What were her attitudes to these major phenomena that do not necessarily line up neatly with a single party? What issues did she care about, and what did being a (non-voting, because female) Tory mean to her? Were there chinks in her conservative political philosophy? Did her views change over time? And is it possible that Lister’s conservatism was not compensatory at all, but rather part and parcel of her self-fashioning as a lesbian?

Just as spectacle was integral to Victorian culture, the understanding and active critique of performance in its myriad forms and situations was integral to Victorian political life. Liberals and Radicals applied this to a variety of organisational formats and gatherings – pre-eminently, meetings linked to other events through performance chaining – to enhance their impact. A dramaturgical approach reveals how performance and performance critique were integrated into political work. Starting with Thomas Thompson, this is evident across three generations of the Thompson-Chesson family. George Thompsons lecturing acumen built from this, establishing the basis for the Trans-Atlantic Anti-Slavery Movement during the 1830s. Frederick Chessons acumen as a political organiser helps show how the realm of the sensible (arts) was integral with reform in a dramaturgy of the intelligible starting in the 1850s. While this recenters liberalism within aesthetics, Amelia Chessons additionally provides ways to revise the historiography of the public/private divide.

In many policies for and practices of education for democratic citizenship it is assumed that the democratic community is a community of shared democratic values. On such an account, education has the task of including “newcomers” into this community by ensuring that they adopt and internalize the common democratic values. In this chapter, I discuss the work of two authors, Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, who both have challenged this understanding of democracy and the democratic community. Both authors highlight the contested (Mouffe) and sporadic (Rancière) nature of the democratic community, thus bringing into view the work done to constitute the political community. They also highlight that this constitution does not happen before democratic politics can take place, but actually is an essential part of it. I provide a reconstruction of Mouffe’s and Rancière’s ideas and explore the implications for education.

Chapter 4 offers a new approach to Margaret Cavendish’s skepticism, focusing on rhetorical strategies of “reoccupation” – a term coined by Hans Blumenberg to understand how seventeenth-century thinkers coped with unresolved questions inherited from medieval nominalism. For Cavendish reoccupation is a way to manage doubt and uncertainty; it involves the appropriation of roles, tropes, plot devices and other textual conventions deemed inadequate or hollow. By analyzing metaphors and topoi from The Blazing World and elsewhere, the chapter shows how reoccupation operates in her work, dramatizing the resolution of crises in authority. Her rejection of Epicurean atomism and her embrace of vitalist materialism correspond to her predilection for reoccupation as a literary device and psychological stance. The chapter also examines her parodies of political theology and sovereignty, thereby offering support for Blumenberg’s arguments against Carl Schmitt. The chapter situates the Duchess of Newcastle’s self-assertion and desire for fame within larger structural patterns of secularization. The coda compares Herbert and Cavendish vis-à-vis Jacques Rancière’s comments on the English Revolution.

This chapter undertakes to explore a particular seismic shift in the fields of both thought and perception unfolding during the early part of the Cold War, as governments and publics grappled uneasily with the threat of nuclear war. I focus on the exploration of a particular cinematic event: the global release in late 1959 of the anti-nuclear war dystopian film On the Beach. Directed by the American Stanley Kramer and based on a 1957 novel by the British-Australian Nevil Shute, the film offers an opportunity to revisit and reflect on the tangled intersections between the cultural, legal and geopolitical orientations of this ‘hot’ Cold War moment from a new angle. While in 1959 an international legal architecture governing nuclear testing and nuclear non-proliferation had yet to emerge, the approach taken in this chapter suggests that a re-examination of this kind – that is attentive to the modes of perception (as well as discourse) that are emergent in this moment may be of interest to contemporary legal scholars seeking to make sense of a world in which nuclear threats have not abated, and international law’s role in managing that threat remains in question.

Written in 1989, The Third Reich commemorates the end of the post-World War II period in which Bolaño had until then lived his entire life. In play at every level, the associative chain reality=fiction=metafiction figures the aestheticizing complicity of a novelist’s decision to turn the historical Third Reich into the boardgame “The Third Reich” that lies at the heart of The Third Reich the novel. While the accommodations the novel makes to more familiar, popular, marketable modes of narration place it among the least experimental, more conventional of Bolaño’s works, its rendering and making visible of convergent regimes of the aesthetic and political merits the reader’s full attention. The central questions it raises about the legacies of German romanticism, through its rewriting of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, echo in the instrumentalizing reproduction, circulation, and distribution of ready-made commercial genres of all kinds that increasingly organize and shape aesthetic experience according to familiar marketing niches across all media. In its resistance to, but also complicity with, the futility of novelistic gamesmanship, the literary, intermedial game The Third Reich both embraces and contests an instrumentalizing, commodifying aesthetics.

Questions of genre, of the commodification of genres and of genres as commodities, of their specialization and marketability, questions central to the institutionalization of creative writing in the academy over the past several decades, preoccupied Bolaño early on when the idea of making a living from writing appeared beyond reach. Written in 1980 but only published in 2002 (its English translation not appearing until 2010), Amberes/Antwerp has aptly been called the “Big Bang of the Bolaño universe.” Recalling Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between the novel’s characteristically dialogical, heteroglossic investments and poetry’s more monological tendencies, Antwerp pursues a consistently dialogic, heteroglossic self-questioning. Oscillating between minimalist narrative and meta-lingual, meta-fictional, meta-textual gestures, it continually stages its own suspension and recommencing. Torn between the pleasure and urgency of a “tax-free” poetic discourse and the commercial viability of the detective novel, the Bolaño of Antwerp aspires to write not “novels that are copies of other novels” but a genreless text in which he can affirm, without reserve, that “‘the only beautiful thing here is the language.’” Positioned roughly halfway between Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris and Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Antwerp remains Bolaño’s most disjunctively Rimbaldian performance.

This chapter synopsises and synthesises the contributions of the preceding chapters. Approaching cosmos as a ‘distribution of the sensible’ (in Jacques Rancière’s phrase), it traces the way kosmos operates to organize reality on the level of aesthetics, politics, ethics and epistemology and to integrate these various domains into a holistic vision. The chapter also stresses, however, the provisionality and partiality of that cosmic whole and considers the alternative visions of reality it precludes, the disorderly order that Heraclitus characterised as ‘the sweeping of random things scattered’ and that James Joyce terms ‘chaosmos’.