Revisiting Edward Aveling

Greenslade, William

Abstract

While the mythologising of nature in British writing at the end of the long nineteenth century has been often regarded as nostalgic, escapist and evasive, this chapter argues that such writing found in the cult of ‘Pan’ and ‘The Open Road’ imaginative resources for resisting the modernising of Britian through a symbolic geography which was furtively, sometimes openly - even contemptuously disruptive. Whether in the form of pagan mysticism or of romantic pedestrianism, the cult of nature observed by writers such as R. L. Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, Edward Thomas and E.M Forster, celebrated forms of redundancy, eccentricity and sheer uselessness. These values were prized as inimical to the rapid modernising of Britain into a mass, industrial society, and to the problematic project of national regeneration, grounded in social utility, taking shape in the early twentieth century.

• Publication Date: Nov 28, 2000
• Deposit Date: Nov 20, 2023
• Publisher: Routledge
• Pages: 145-161
• Book Title: Eleanor Marx: Life. Work. Contacts.
• Chapter Number: 3
• ISBN: 9780754601135
• Keywords: Edward Aveling Eleanor Marx
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11456773
• Publisher URL: https://www.routledge.com/Eleanor-Marx-18551898-Life-Work-Contacts/Stokes/p/book/9780367882570
• Contract Date: Nov 1, 1998