This chapter examines Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! as Faulkner’s first novels to depict the racial ideology of the South as unstable and incoherent. Whereas the author initially attempted to understand how information continuously flows through a networked system as culture, these novels depict entropic states capable of undermining and destroying the social order. In Absalom, Absalom! especially, we see how regimes of power fail from within – with a network of individuals increasingly unable to relate to each other, so mediated are they by the ideological and racial abstractions of the plantation system. These emergent entropic states, though perilous to the wellbeing of many, are not simply to be feared. As ideological surfaces waver in their ability to disseminate cultural directives, there emerges the potential for reorganization and renewal, trajectories of novelty and behavior that gesture beyond the seemingly intractable bounds of social space and the self-reflexive epistemology of textual space that reinforces them.

Chapter 1 reconstructs the conceptual history of tact as a social, ethical, and aesthetic category. Starting out with Voltaire’s 1769 definition that marks tact’s fundamental paradigm shift from a sense of feeling to a form of sociability, I reconstruct the word’s ensuing career as a key concept in 19th- and 20th-century pedagogical, philosophical, and literary discourse. I discuss tact’s history within the context of the demise of the ancien régime and the rise of the bourgeois subject, reflecting on a variety of different historical and philosophical explanations (Elias, Adorno, Foucault). I reconstruct how and why, around 1800, tact turns into a key philosophical term, depicting an intuitive form of empirical judgement (Kant). I show how, in the second half of the 19th century, tact, understood as an individual deviation from normative structures, came to occupy a key position in the method dispute between the humanities and the natural sciences (Helmholtz). I conclude by reflecting on how psychological tact went on to become a key category in modern and contemporary hermeneutics, uniting the otherwise antagonistic work of scholars incl. Adorno, Gadamer, Barthes, Felski, and Macé.

This chapter argues that two works of Victorian children’s literature – Alfred Elwes’s The Adventures of a Bear (1853) and The Adventures of a Dog (1854) – capture the complex politics of selfhood in relation to animality and law. They also demonstrate the trope of transformation from animal to human: the dog becomes a trusted policeman (or equivalent) and the bear ends up a blind beggar. In both cases, the choice of animals as protagonists allows for a frank discussion of violence, gender, and class conflict.

When the German national parliament, the Bundestag, held a ceremony to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War on 8 May 2015, the historian Heinrich August Winkler was asked to deliver the main address. In his speech, Winkler confirmed the central role of National Socialism and the Holocaust for German national identity. Germany’s responsibility for genocide and war meant, seventy years after the events, a special responsibility toward Israel, and for the states of east-central and eastern Europe, which had suffered most terribly under German occupation, and for the European Union project as a project of peace and reconciliation in a continent where German hypernationalism had brought destruction on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

Chapter 2 looks at Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in the context of the Belle Époque as an age characterised by the disintegration of existing hierarchies, norms, and conventions. I start out by considering the novel’s long-lost earliest drafts, Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, to then focus on close readings of a series of encounters between Marcel, Charlus, Albertine, and Andrée. Tact, Proust’s novel suggests, can be interpreted as an egalitarian force, indicating an equilibrium between the people involved. At the same time, it can also be seen as a creator of power imbalance, and a marker of social distinction. This conflict gives rise to a number of questions: Is tact a moral or an amoral category? Where do we draw the line between tact, hypocrisy, and lying? How do we deal with the uncertainty of interpretation as it begins to turn into one of the narrator’s most tantalizing concerns? Drawing on a variety of different theorists of tact (incl. Kant, Schopenhauer, Simmel, Sartre, Gadamer, Hall, Bourdieu, Goffman, Luhmann), I describe Proust’s tact as a paradoxical category that oscillates between autonomy and control, classification and declassification.

This essay traces the relationship between colonization and academia over recent times, associating it with various intellectual moves to interrogate the hegemonic assumptions of Western culture. It argues that racial representations in literature are multifaceted and variegated, with literary studies offering opportunities to effectively demystify myths about the putative universality of American or European subject systems. This is tied to the historical specificity of particular colonial situations, with reference to the work of Nicholas Thomas, noting how one significant contribution of Australian cultural theory to literary studies has been to make debates around settler colonial paradigms more prominent. This leads into discussion of larger questions around regional autonomy, cultural appropriation and social class, with reference to the work of Walter Mignolo and Stuart Hall. It also touches upon political controversies involving with the highly problematic relationship between academic and civic authorities, a continuing power struggle that can be traced back to medieval times. The essay concludes that the etymological links between university and universality offer scope to resist local standardizations of all kinds, and in this sense a decentring of racial hierarchies runs in parallel to a decentring of geographical hierarchies.

Chapter 5 engages with Barthes’s tact by situating it within a philosophical landscape that expands from the West (Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche) to the East (Kakuzō, Suzuki). In so doing, I reconstruct how Barthes explores the connection between human sociability and intellectual productivity in view of its hermeneutic potential. I show that Barthes’s alternative practice of critical inquiry bears striking resemblance to Adorno’s idea of hermeneutical tact. I argue that Barthes’s notion of tact, although unfashionable in the 1970s, is crucial to ongoing debates that challenge the hermeneutic of suspicion (Gadamer, Ricœur) and transgress the limits of critique (Felski). I also question, however, if the essentially democratic idea of a tactful hermeneutics first introduced by Kant truly translates into Barthes’s, Adorno’s and Gadamer’s theories. Tact, they jointly contend, cannot be taught. Unlike politeness, it must be lived. The elitism this idea implies, and its implicit vicinity to the Romantic idea of the genius, give rise to the suspicion that, while aiming to suspend any class-oriented conceptions of tact, in the end, this may be precisely what their theories help to reproduce.

This is the first of three chapters showing how caricature talk co-operates with characterisation techniques in genre-defining novels of the Romantic period. I give an account of anti-caricature rhetoric in the critical reception of Jane Austen’s novels, from contemporaneous reviews and responses to the twentieth century. I describe Austen’s particular moral concept of caricature as an effect of self-indulgence, first examining instances of the word ’caricature’ in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, then close-reading depictions of fat bodies in Persuasion and Sanditon, as instances of literary realism’s ’explained caricatures’.

This book begins with a family that does not fit. Pollie Keen was born to a Buckinghamshire washerwoman. She spent her teenage years as a servant, married a farm laborer-turned-soldier, and lived out her late twenties as a lady of leisure, flitting between tea parties, carriage rides, and dances that lasted into the early hours of the morning. In 1889, Pollie, her three children, and her husband Dick, by then a sergeant with the Royal Horse Artillery, went to India. It was once the family had settled in Sialkot in Punjab that Pollie’s social status and material world changed so dramatically. Dick wrote to his brother that the family was enjoying the “fine country” and enumerated the servants at their disposal. “I am same [sic] like gentleman. We are both in bed when the cook comes in to light the fire, lay the breakfast and all ready before we get up, and the barber taps at the door to shave me and man is waiting to clean the boots and clothes for all of us.”1 Having fires laid, shoes polished, breakfast made, and a barber at the ready were luxuries Dick and Pollie could never reasonably have hoped for in Britain. Pollie bragged to her mother that, after a lifetime of domestic labor, her only duties were dusting and changing the bed linens.2

Complaints about the libretto have long shadowed The Magic Flute. The spoken dialogue especially has been disparaged, first regarding plot and, recently, gender and race. This chapter argues that to cut the dialogue is to lose a wealth of detail with respect to character and plot that needs to be understood as essential to the dramatic action. It offers close readings starting at the level of words or phrases that cannot be lost without consequence. Issues examined in speech include class and institutional hypocrisy (Tamino and Papageno); gender (the Queen of the Night); race (Monostatos); and female ambition (Sarastro). Each character conveys in speech a desire to be seen beyond stereotype, demonstrated here alongside relevant social context in Mozart’s time and ours. With nuanced treatment of controversial issues, the chapter debunks a fundamentally flawed justification for cuts – that our society is morally superior to the one that produced this work.

This chapter considers the relationship between colonial knowledge, imperial education, and class mobility. British working-class children were not educated for the empire, and British soldiers received almost no country-specific training. Once in India, enlisted men were actively discouraged from developing more than the most basic of language skills. But in spite of gaining no material benefits from learning about India, some non-elite Brits did devote themselves to learning native languages, local religious practices, and further understanding the social world of British India. To do so, they at times crossed boundaries of class and race, developing relationships with native Indians and elite British in the process. The remnants of these educational endeavors include poetry, exam results, scrapbooks, and hand-illustrated glossaries through which non-elites constructed their own forms of colonial knowledge. But autodidacts failed to translate this learning or these new relationships into material gain because the governing institutions of the Raj could not conceive of the utility of colonial knowledge for this class.

This chapter examines how working-class women born in Britain and their India-raised daughters understood domestic service. The slipperiness of status in India was most visible in the presence of servants in the homes and workspaces of British of all classes. Working-class women, many of whom had worked as servants themselves before coming to India, found themselves transformed into mistresses upon arrival in the country. Women could assign their domestic duties to servants, take them up again when they chose, and even take on roles as servants themselves. These changes in relationship to service came about not just as the result of changing financial circumstances, but in response to causes as disparate as the birth of a child or a change in the season. Working-class women born in Britain tended to see their status as employers as unstable, but that instability did not necessarily provoke anxieties over racial degeneration. Girls raised, educated, and remaining in India balked at the notion of going into domestic service, even as the schools designed to educate them attempted to train this second generation for that purpose.

This chapter revisits some of the individuals and families we have encountered throughout the text, following these families past their time in India. Thinking about the forces that compelled families and individuals to make these choices, or foreclosed possibilities, provides an answer to the question of what happened to popular and historical memory of the working-class Raj. Back in Britain, men and women who had enjoyed an elevated social status could find it difficult to reintegrate into their communities of origin, which reinforced conformity rather than difference. As a result, returning Britons purposefully forgot tales of Indian service and elite pretensions in efforts to manage family relations. In contrast, those men and women who settled with their families in India or other parts of the empire – or who chose to abandon their families of origin – had a greater incentive to embrace a new class status and create family histories celebrating their climb up the social ranks of the British Empire.

Falling in love is free…or is it? Although our “heart” and emotions may be unconnected to how much money or education we have or where we live, the process of initiating and maintaining a romantic relationship is most definitely connected to socioeconomic status (SES) and place. This chapter reviews the literature from the past fifteen years on the role of social class in four stages of romantic relationships: dating, cohabitation, marriage, and divorce. The existing research reveals several patterns. First, social class impacts all stages of a relationship, which contributes to perpetuating social class inequities throughout generations. Second, heteronormative assumptions dominate the existing literature with little focus on LGBTQ+ relationships. Moreover, gender appears to overshadow any impact of social class – in other words, women and men are bound by gender role expectations in relationships regardless of SES. Finally, and most importantly, research shows that most individuals, regardless of social class, hope to find a life partner and start a family. What social class “buys” an individual in terms of romance is ease…ease to date, marry, and divorce.

In examining how practices of theatregoing were impacted by the war this chapter provides a partner to Claire Cochrane’s examination of theatre-making in Chapter 3. It considers changing audience demographics over the war and reveals how the ‘new’ audiences were often blamed for the deterioration of theatrical quality. It pays particular attention to the two groups of audiences that received the greatest attention during the war: women (especially single women and mothers) and servicemen. Whilst recognising the value of newspaper and magazine commentaries on audience, the chapter also draws on letters, memoirs, commentaries and diary entries to understand and draw out the first-person experience of theatre-going during the war. It highlights the impact of air raids, lighting restrictions, the Amusements Tax and other wartime conditions on audiences. It also shows how changing social realities and relations in the wider world impacted on the theatre, bringing new class and gender dynamics into the auditorium.

Following the previous discussion of popular performance forms, this chapter examines the ways in which popular war-time melodramas drew on both existing traditions within British theatre and on the kinds of social debates which prevailed before the war and were transformed by it. The chapter also considers how genres such as the sketch or the one act play, circulating in music halls, in revues and at wartime charity fund-raisers, like melodramas, adapted to and reflected the changing and gendered experience of wartime conditions. These dramas often represented topical events - such as espionage - and explored contemporary anxieties - especially around gender and domestic life in war-time - whilst capitalising on the popularity of pre-existing dramatic forms.

Harnessing the power of the presidency, Lyndon Baines Johnson required America to wrestle with its past. Together, the powerful social movements of the 1960s and his Great Society catalyzed a cycle of reckoning and discomfort that changed America until the war in Vietnam, and anger and angst about government, identity, and power brought it to an end. We’ve tried to forget LBJ and, in some cases, what his presidency achieved and helped unearth. But we ignore him at our peril. The Johnson years have much to teach us, as America in the 1960s and today’s America have much in common. America today, as in the 1960s, is tumultuous. Armed with our memories and different conceptions of how we got here, we’re struggling to define our problems and the answers appear unknowable and out of reach. But instead of actively looking away from the past, we can choose to learn from it. Remembering Lyndon Johnson and his presidency – the good and the bad – offers us the opportunity to reposition government as an ally, not an enemy, and to acknowledge and confront the historically toxic relationship that binds power, politics, and American identity so we can move closer to our democratic aspirations.

This chapter considers the immediate post-war period and the ways in which representations of the war on stage shifted in relation to changing cultural attitudes in the 1920s and 1930s. It begins with the most well-known play of the period, Sheriff’s Journey’s End (1928) and shows how, rather than being unique, Journey’s End was part of a crescendo of works on the subject of war. The chapter argues that during the inter-war period playwrights made repeated attempts to find a stage language with which to speak of the shock of the battlefield, as well as the lasting imprint that it left upon every aspect of society. In examining this, the chapter considered better-known plays by authors including Noël Coward, Galsworthy, Priestly, O’Casey and Maugham alongside equally important works such as Corrie’s In Time o’ Strife: Atkinson’s The Chimney Corner, Smith’s Autumn Crocus, Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement, Box’s Angels at War, Pilcher’s The Searcher, Griffiths’ Tunnel Trench and Berkeley’s The White Chateau. As well as exploring the contribution of female playwrights, the chapter considers questions of class strife, the adaptation of veterans to post-war life, and changing sexual mores.

Twentieth-century feminist activism and thought spread with an urgency and ambition unseen before, as advocates for women achieved mass recognition, unsettled long-held convictions, and upset the status quo in ways unimaginable in previous centuries. No novel genre escaped these changes or failed to register them. Feminist politics reshaped the content, and sometimes the form, of the novel. Yet, dramatic as the expansion of US women’s opportunities was, progress was never unchallenged or universal. Feminist political gains inspired significant backlash: Patriarchy supporters fought back. Meanwhile, feminist organizing fractured from within. Before the twentieth century even began, women of color were explaining why they couldn’t be expected to identify only as women, as if all women belonged in a single category. Their message often went unheeded, particularly in the most widely circulated versions of feminist thought, which elevated white middle-class experiences over those of working-class, Indigenous, Black, Latina, and Asian women. Throughout the century, narratives by women of color pushed back against the white supremacist version of feminism. The American novel narrated multiple feminisms, triumphant and defeated, jubilant and anguished, razor-focused and utterly lost.