Dr Matthew Taunton, BA, MA, PhD (London)
Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow
Research interests:
- The City in Literature and Film
- Literature and Politics in the 20th Century
- Journalism and the Press
- British Responses to the Russian Revolution
Matthew Taunton’s research interests cover a variety of topics in literary and cultural history from the nineteenth century to the present. His first book Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009) examined literary and filmic representations of mass housing from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth. The book focussed on the ways in which seismic changes in urban dwelling patterns were registered in literature and film, from novels like Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir and George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air to films such as La Haine and Nil By Mouth. The book argued for a fundamental rethinking of the culture of the modern city, countering a widespread critical obsession with outdoor phenomena – streetwalking, windowshopping and flânerie – in order to focus on the changing realities of indoor inhabitation. The urban home is a realm where the most intimate domestic experiences intersect with the wider political realities of architecture, urban planning and public policy. Fictions of the City explores this interface.
His present Leverhulme-funded research project examines the ways in which the British literary intelligentsia responded to the Russian revolution, in novels, plays and journalism. Few doubt that the French Revolution had a huge impact on the cultural politics of English literature after 1789. The impact of the Russian Revolution in Britain has received less attention, but is arguably comparable in its effects, triggering bouts of Burkean antipathy, revolutionary enthusiasm, and painful disillusionment, shifting the grounds of the political debate. Accounts of the political landscape in this inter-war period have often seemed unable to think beyond the rigid polarities of the post-1945 Cold War, a vice-like geopolitical mindset that even now, twenty years after the demise of the Soviet Union, has barely loosened its grip. This book – provisionally entitled The Spectre of Bolshevism – will unpick the strands of a discourse about the Russian Revolution in order to show the transformative effects it had on English Socialism. Examining a diverse group of writers including Wells, Chesterton, Shaw, Richardson, Keynes, Woolf and Orwell, this book will investigate the intersection of literature, politics, and the press in the period, drawing attention to a neglected set of debates that have a vital relevance in our times.
Matthew Taunton is a Fellow of the London Consortium and Associate Editor of Critical Quarterly.
Publications:
Book
Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Journal Article
‘Collective Farm or Cottage Economy?: English Socialism and Perceptions of Soviet Agriculture in the Period of the First Five-Year-Plan’ in Critical Quarterly 53.3, Autumn 2011, special issue on ‘Food’ ed. by Matthew Taunton and Lucy Scholes (forthcoming)
Chapters in Edited Volumes
‘Worlds made of Concrete and Celluloid: The London Council Estate in Nil By Mouth and Wonderland’ in Ansgar Nünning, Vera Nünning and Birgit Neumann (eds.), Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2010)
‘The Flâneur and the Freeholder: Paris and London in Metroland’ in Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs (eds.), Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (New York; London: Continuum, 2011)
‘The Significance of the Stalin-Wells Talk: Wells, Shaw and Keynes on Russia’ in Rebecca Beasley and Phillip Bullock (eds.), Russia in Britain (forthcoming, publisher tbc.)
Dictionary Entries
c100 entries in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds.), Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism (London: British Library, 2009). Total contribution amounts to over 40,000 words. Entries include: ‘Distribution’, ‘Electrical Journals’, ‘Evening News (1881-1987), ‘Field (1853- )’, ‘Journalism Schools’, ‘Letters / Correspondence’, ‘Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1800-1859)’, ‘Press Association’, ‘Printing Presses’, ‘Provincial Newspaper Society’
Selected Reviews
Review of Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart (eds.), Restless Cities (London; New York: Verso, 2010) in Textual Practice (forthcoming)
Review of Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2008) in Critical Quarterly (forthcoming)
‘The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain’, review of Ian Jack, The Country Formerly
Known as Great Britain on the New Statesman website, 26th October 2009
‘Where the Other Half Lives’, review of Sarah Glynn, Where the Other Half Lives: Lower Income
Housing in a Neoliberal World on the New Statesman website, 8th Oct 2009
‘Problems With Sartre’, review of Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy in
New Statesman, 6th August 2009
‘Ties that Bound’, in-depth review of Dave Clements, Alastair Donald, Martin Earnshaw and
Austin Williams (eds.) The Future of Community: Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated in Times
Literary Supplement, 31st July 2009
‘Film Rebuffs’, review of D.M. Thomas, Bleak Hotel: The Hollywood Saga of the White Hotel in
Times Literary Supplement, 28th January 2009
‘Immortal Pages’, review of Jeff Gomez, Print is Dead in Times Literary Supplement, 7th March
2008
‘Heart of Darkness’, review of Slavoj Zizek, Violence in New Statesman, 31st January 2008