I’m fixin’ to start a new project. I’m really keen on looking into late 19th century thinking about socialism in the US, specifically rhetoric about socialism–defining it, for it, against it, narrativizing it–and particularly how religious belief enters into such rhetoric. I want to use this blog as a way of recording some of my findings and ideas.
For the secondary materials, I am taking as starting point a text recommended to me by Stefan Cieply (read his latest article): John C. Cort’s Christian Socialism: An Informal History (Orbis, 1988). I have not gotten far into it, yet, but it looks like a good sweeping overview and includes a section on the US, with headings featuring names both familiar (Ely, Bellamy) and unfamiliar (Bliss, Herron, Carr, and more) to me.
For the primary literary materials, I’ll be looking into Howells and Bellamy, for sure, but I hope to also find many other self-consciously literary treatments of socialism in the period. From very preliminary research, there appears to have been a multitude, one of which (Metzerott, Shoemaker; 1889) I have begun to think about here but still need to finish reading. Contemporary reviews have spoiled the ending for me (but that’s OK–I won’t spoil it for you), and it definitely is all about narrativizing a Christian socialism against a foreign, violent, godless form of anti-capitalism. It also self-consciously follows Bellamy’s “nationalist” politics.
All for now. More later. It’s very exciting to be on to something new, and to be out of the waste business (although I hear once you’re in, you can’t really ever get out).