Title: Literature in the Public Service
Description: "Historians and sociologists have been consistently - albeit gloomily - enthralled by Max Weber's model of the inevitable rise of the neurocrat. However, literary critics positively boast that writers, like academics, cannot 'do admin'. While Weber's thesis about the rise of the entrepreneur - all fire, individuality, thrust - is in tune with what we think literature is about, his thesis about the rise of the bureaucrat is not, yet 'creative bureaucracy' is not only a euphemism for bending the rules. Literature in the Public Service shows how the public service makes its workers original, taking them beyond an individuated point of view to imagine the perfect public system. Creativity theorists too have swapped the model of solitary inspiration for a managed creative environment. John Milton, Anthony Trollope, and David Hare are examples of how authors work in and write about the public service, during its crisis moments"--
Subjects: Milton, john, 1608-1674, criticism and interpretation, Trollope, anthony, 1815-1882, Hare, david, 1947-, English literature, history and criticism, 19th century, English literature, history and criticism, 20th century, Civil service in literature, English literature, Bureaucracy in literature, Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.), History and criticism, Criticism and interpretation, Literature and civil service