This book stages an encounter between romanticism in post-war and contemporary cinema and trends in historical materialism associated with revolutionary romantic historiography. Focused primarily on British cinema and examples of Hollywood cinema with significant relationships to British and English culture and history, it is loosely configured around three key emblematic motifsācountry, land, peopleāthat are simultaneously core values and rallying cries of distinctive varieties of conservative, restitutionist and revolutionary romanticism and the range of opposed political orientations they generate, from conservative nationalism to radical internationalism. Texts drawn on include Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburgerās film The Elusive Pimpernel (1950), a short poetic documentary, The Creek (2018) made to commemorate an abandoned estuarial commons in the north east of England, the literary texts of J. R. R. Tolkien, alongside their contemporary filmic adaptations by Peter Jackson, and the Pirates of the Caribbean (hereafter POC) franchise. Popular cultural genresālike the blockbusterāprovide subtle means with which to follow the twisted threads of capitalism, class and nation in the labyrinth of history. The promptings of the imaginative freedoms of such films can enable a political task associated with historical materialismāthe process of re-narrativising from below the class struggles that have been de-narrativised from above. Both strategies of history telling are related to romanticism. The official, national narratives of conservative romanticism have often wiped clean the traces of the heterogeneous many who struggled against the capitalist class. Revolutionary romanticism labours from below to put back together what has been dismembered or never recorded, and it needs to be open to a wide range of cultural materials to have any chance of achieving this task. Historical materialism of the type essayed here has been missing from British film studies which even in the moment of its post-1990s āhistorical turnā has remained focused on historical contextualisation largely confined to the moment of production, exhibition or reception of a film or film cycle (Spicer 2004). In seeking to combine textual and contextual analysis, my approach has been to attempt to establish a historically longer view of the national culture which historical materialism is able to pick up with its attention to patterns of evolving class relationships. Ultimately, the book seeks to establish the continuing relevance of the revolutionary romantic critique of capitalist modernity to the representation in film of pressing contemporary political concerns such as the fate of the proletariat, populism, Brexit post-nationalism, ecocide and the Anthropocene.
Romanticism, historical materialism, capitalism. Each of the three elements at the centre of this study are controversial and difficult to define. Romanticism is famously elusive, especially in its cultural politics. As Terry Eagleton puts it: āIf the movement contains some of the most fervent advocates of the French Revolution it also contains some of its most rabid antagonistsā (Eagleton 2014, p. 111). The diversity of romantic cultural politics has of course been leapt on by nominalists and anti-essentialists as evidence that romanticism only exists in the disconnected pluralāromanticismsānot the grand singular. My own starting point is Michael Lowy and Robert Sayreās unifying definition of European romanticism as āa vast cultural movement of protest against modern industry and capitalist society in the name of pre-modern (as pre-capitalist) valuesā (Lowy and Sayre 2002, p. 17). From this definition Lowy and Sayre generate a typology of romantic cultural politics which includes the following categories: restitutionist, conservative, fascistic, resigned, reformist and revolutionary and/or utopian (Lowy and Sayre 2002, p. 58). This diversity demonstrates romanticismās conflicting views on the problem of capitalism. Hazy conservative romantic nostalgia, in all its ahistorical complacency and its strong repression of the horrors of the past, for instance, is a world away from a revolutionary romanticism traumatised by the defeated past and seeking to redeem its struggles in social conditions whose continuities with that past are keenly recognised. Which brings us to capitalism. Given that the concept is itself subject to considerable repressionāits most thorough critical account being given in the often unwelcome form of that bearer of bourgeois bad news, Marxismāit is not surprising that it too proves elusive. For the conservative or liberal romantic, capitalism as a foundational modern social form is either contained and misrecognized in the restricted incarnation of its own most obviously noxious effects, which can then be vigorously deprecated whilst leaving the causal structures responsible for them unaddressed, or, alternatively it is idealised and sanitised in some ahistorical formulation. For instance, capitalism as commercialisationāor the activity of buying and selling in marketsāin which case, any problems are abuses of a system whose metabolism matches that of civilization itself and is therefore untranscendable.
The problem of such vague or evasive definitions of capitalism for any revolutionary romanticism is that if capitalism is weakly grasped in its historical specificity then the desire to overcome it through the inspiration of pre-capitalist examples is stymied. And here, historical materialism is vital for it was devised to establish the originality and historical difference of capitalism. Which, unfortunately, doesnāt mean that there arenāt problems of definition here too. For historical materialists often strenuously disagree on the essentials of the approach they share. Specifically, the mechanism of historical change, of the movement between modes of production, has been an object of dispute. In adopting the historical materialism associated with Political Marxism this study differentiates itself from those pursuing a more classical productive force determinism. For instance, the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood favours an emphasis on class relations and struggle as the mechanisms by which historical change occurs. In this way her work demonstrates a key advantage over other varieties of historical materialism as it provides a radically historicist approach to capitalism. That is to say, Political Marxism seeks to draw out the historical novelty of capitalism, and it does this by viewing the problem of historical change (the transition between the feudal and capitalist modes of production for instance) in such a way as to avoid question begging assumptions like the idea that the object whose emergence needs to be explainedācapitalismāsomehow pre-exists itself, lurking in the interstices of feudalism, waiting for obstacles to its flourishing to fall away. This makes for immense challenges in terms of historical accounting as one can no longer assume, as productive force determinism does, that something akin to capitalism, understood ultimately as a transhistorical motivation for the development of productivity, simply waits for the conditions in which it can ripen, as it is supposed to have done during the feudal period through trade and urban development. Such assumptions relieve one of the difficulty of accounting for the complexity of historical changeāthe reasons why, for instance, classes abandon old ways of living and adopt other modes of reproducing themselves that might appear far inferior in a number of ways. The feudal peasantryās adoption of capitalism is one such area of uncertainty. But equally, because transhistorical productive force determinism allows one to fall back on the idea of an underlying pressure, manifesting itself everywhere to different degrees, and moving towards a single outcome, it fails to bring into sufficiently sharp relief nationally specific starting points in the balance of power between different classes in their conflictual social relations with one another. Such comparisons provide more compelling accounts of the differences in the development of capitalism across eastern and western Europe, as well as giving us an explanation for the vigour and precociousness of capitalism in England and therefore ultimately help to provide perspectives in our Brexit moment on the political configuration of what I refer to below as the end of British history (Brenner 2007).
Political Marxism and Historical Agency
A crucial advantage of the historical materialism of Political Marxism in the study of romantic culture is that its model of historical change provides more space for the agency of those who in other models of historical materialism tend to get neglected in the grand movement of epochs. Indeed, Political Marxists have explicitly recognised a debt to the āhistory from belowā or class struggle approach to history pioneered by British Marxist historians such as E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, George RudĆ© and Eric Hobsbawm (Wood 1991). ...