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Jonathan Foster

About me

Literature constitutes an important medium for exploring and conceptualising administrative statecraft - indeed, novels helped to popularise and spread the term “bureaucracy” in the first place. My research explores the relationship between literature and state administration, focusing on representations of British state institutions in the work of Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and Virginia Woolf. These authors provide trenchant critiques of officialdom, intervening in public and political debates regarding administrative reform, whilst also shedding light on textual features of modern statecraft such as official print culture, administrative databases and bureaucratic forms.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • "Organised Clairvoyance": Supranational Surveillance and Controlled Borderlessness in H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia

    2022. Jonathan Foster. Zeitschrift für Anglistik and Amerikanistik 70 (2), 145-157

    Article

    In A Modern Utopia (1905), H. G. Wells prophesised that emergent technologies of personal identification such as fingerprinting and central registries would enable the dismantling of national borders. Situating Wells's novel as a literary expression of a period of experimentation in European mobility control at the turn of the twentieth century, this essay argues that Wells's ideas about controlled borderlessness were indeed highly prescient, anticipating the recent rise of supranational mobility control à la the EU's Schengen cooperation. If Wells's theorisation of mobility control was ahead of its time, then so was his suspenseful narrative about undocumented aliens in utopia fearfully navigating a supranational surveillance state. In this essay I emphasise the correspondences between Wells's delineation of controlled borderlessness and modern-day supranational mobility control, whilst also highlighting discrepancies and discordant notes in Wells's bureaucratic-technocratic utopian vision.

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