| Summary: | "Speculative States pursues two related goals, one reconstructive and literary-historical, the other conceptual. First, the book restores to view literature's engagements with the slow politics of reform by linking the development of the institutional forms of the state to the aesthetic forms of literary writing. In doing so, it maps out a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain that spans the late Victorian and modernist periods. Second, the book also makes visible an ambitious reformist idiom which insists that we think about the state as an aspirational (speculative) figure--as a form of life in its own right rather than as a set of detached administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes. Placing literary studies in dialogue with political theory, philosophy, and the history of ideas, Speculative States marks a major contribution to current debates about literature and the state, but it also centrally intervenes in conversations in critical theory by urging a fuller engagement with the critical and speculative dimensions of the dialectical imagination"--Publisher's description.
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