ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses recent critical work on the two most intensive periods of radical literary activity in Victorian Britain: the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s and the socialist revival of the 1880s and 1890s. The focus of the chapter is on the prolific print culture which underpinned radical politics. Chartist fiction is now recognized as a major literary achievement, and critical attention has focused on its uniquely oppositional aesthetic and ideological characteristics as well as its dialogic relationship with the mainstream novel. The socialist renaissance of the fin de siècle is less well studied, but innovative recovery work has begun to reveal a rich literary landscape of radical periodicals and the serialized fiction which these magazines, newspapers, and journals published.
