H.G. Wells and the empire: the artist and the intellectual

"H.G. Wells and the Empire: The Artist and the Intellectual" aims to reconstruct H.G. Wells’s (1866-1946) artistic engagement in relation to the power politics of imperialism. The thesis takes into account the vast fictional and non-fictional output of the author, averagely from the age of New Imperialism to the adjacent rise of the first totalitarian movement in Italy in the 1920s. The present work will reveal Wells’s ambivalent and revolutionary standing in the British Empire, while also exploring his anti-fascist crusade. Literary criticism, I contend, has long neglected this crucial intellectual aspect of Wells’s career. Since Bernard Bergonzi’s pioneering study "The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances" (1961), critical focus has been extensively devoted to Wells’s evolutionary thinking, establishing a canon which largely obscures Wells’s magnitude in terms of political commitment. For decades, only the early corpus of the British writer has been taken into serious critical consideration (1890-1899); criticism, as consequence, has overlooked Wells’s artistic position in British culture of the past century. Only rapidly mentioned in Raymond Williams’s seminal "Culture and Society" (1958), Wells was probably the most famous and influential intellectual on the planet in the first half of the twentieth century; however, after his death, Wells has incurred a progressive critical oblivion. The emergence of post-colonial studies in the 1970s, equally, have paradoxically disregarded Wells’s artistic and intellectual prominence in European imperial culture. "H.G. Wells and the Empire" purports to fill this cultural gap, by historicizing the author’s public activity in the context of imperialism.