The Introduction begins to outline a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain around 1900 by turning to a period that forces us to look beyond the connotations associated with the terms reform and revolution today. The chapter presents the book’s two intertwined goals, one reconstructive and literary-historical, the other conceptual and theoretical. First, British Literature and the Life of Institutions reconstructs the emergence of a reformist literary mode around 1900 by exploring how literary texts responded and adapted to the elongated rhythms of institutional change that characterized the emergence of new state structures in this period. But the book also, secondly, aims to make visible a reformist idiom which pervades literary, philosophical, political, and social writing of the period, and which insists that we need to think about the state as an idea, as a speculative figure, rather than as a set of administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes.
(Re)assembling the ‘normal’ in neoliberal policy discourses: tracing gender regimes in the age of risk
