Satirising the bourgeois worldview: Patrick Hamilton's Impromptu in Moribundia

Abstract

As well as being a cultural product itself, literature provides a means for the critical interrogation of the processes of cultural production and consumption in class-structured capitalist society. Realist narrative, utopian speculation and dystopian conjecture have all been used to good effect. So, too, have satire and fable, and these come together in a neglected and largely forgotten novel from 1939, Impromptu in Moribundia,¹ written by the bourgeois Marxist Patrick Hamilton. Though dated in many ways, and clearly rooted in a particular social and political context, this fabulous tale, nevertheless, retains interest for those wishing to critique the production of the bourgeois cultural worldview.²