| Popis: |
The embedding of reformist politics in the medium of poetic form is a central feature of the reformist literary mode. Chapter 4 counterpoints the vision of class strife that haunts Wells’s scientific romances from the 1890s with the gradualist reformist impulse that came to the fore in tax debates in the early 1900s. The development of more nuanced forms of graduated taxation in the Edwardian period turned the tax system into a means of social integration, leading to the emergence of a new institutional idiom that can help us understand the generic hybridity of Wells’s works of this period. These books, notably Wells’s Edwardian ‘trilogy’ (Anticipations, 1901; Mankind in the Making, 1903; A Modern Utopia, 1905), responded to a new understanding of national wealth in terms of kinetic, redistributable ‘incomes’ rather than in terms of fixed private ‘wealth’. |
