Introduction

Abstract

The introduction complicates the Orwellian orthodoxies we have inherited regarding literary vulnerability and monolithic state power by explaining how Matthew Arnold’s ideas about the state a guardian of culture found full expression in post-war Britain. Moving from examples including Reith’s BBC and Keynes’ Arts Council, it then discusses how institutional beliefs about the identity of literature’s publics and what they needed were gradually disrupted by the increasing ethnic and cultural diversification of Britain after the 1948 Nationality Act. The final sections of the Introduction set out the book’s conceptual challenge to the Manicheanism structuring both Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field, and ideas of the state as either censor or ultimate saviour. It concludes by evaluating the implications of viewing sponsorship as an expressive act for ideas of autonomy, and why archival work has the potential to transform our understanding of literature and its reading publics.