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American literary critic and political activist Irving Howe defines the political novel as a novel in which the dominant element is either political ideas or a political milieu. Howe’s pioneering study, published in 1957, still serves as a point of departure for studies of connections between politics and literature (although the first study to include the term political novel in its title was published by American scholar Morris Edmund Speare in 1924).

One question is whether the political novel constitutes a distinct genre of fiction. Howe argues against the use of any inappropriately dichotomous classifications. Another important question is how the primarily literary aspects of the political novel are related to its political content. For some critics, the political novelist attempts to serve two masters—literary quality and political verisimilitude. In Howe’s view, a sort of continuum can be arranged, with novels best illuminated by literary analysis at one end and novels best studied by means of ideological analysis at the other. Scholars who insist on at least some distinction of this sort appear to understand politics as a more or less determinate area of human experience, to be given its due in fiction, but which can corrupt and destroy fiction as well.

However, there are other scholars who understand politics to be all-pervasive. From this standpoint, as Marxist theorist and literary critic Frederic Jameson insists, since “everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political,” it is pointless to identify some works as political and others not (1981, 5). For theorists like Jameson, the problem of genre vanishes, because genre itself is no longer a useful concept in literary theory. Other scholars, such as John Whalen-Bridge, however, prefer to retain distinctions that permit articulations of relations between politics and aesthetics, without dissolving all differences between them.

It is often argued that political novels constitute a significant source for the public’s understanding of politics. Literary critic Mary McCarthy contends, for example, that most Americans learn about politics from reading political fiction. For Bernard Crick, contemporary political thinking is as likely to be found in novels as in philosophical treatises, and in novels it is certainly in a more accessible form. Many of the questions addressed in political philosophy are present in some form in political fiction. Political fiction addresses questions such as the nature of authority, political conflict, the possibilities for and obstacles to political transformation, and the extent to which the past imposes decisive limitations on political action toward the conditions for a good way of life for human beings. The turn to political novels has been explained and defended as a potentially fruitful response to what some scholars see as the abandonment by both academic philosophy and academic political science of any significant intellectual interest in informing political thinking in the wider culture, a theme anticipated in part by American intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes in 1958.

A Typology Of Political Novels

Government Institutions And Political Movements

Several different sorts of novels may be identified as political novels, although a number of the works listed could easily be placed in more than one category. Some are novels that have settings in political movements or institutions of government. Such novels began with nineteenth-century examples, including British statesman and writer Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844), Anthony Trollope’s six Paliser or “parliamentary” novels (1864–1879), Henry Adams’s Democracy (1880), and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946). Among the more recent so-called insider novels are Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent (1959), Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place (1961) Gore Vidal’s Washington, D.C. (1967), Lynne Cheney’s Executive Privilege (1979), Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost (1991), Richard Perle’s Hard Line (1992), and Joe Klein’s Primary Colors (1996).

Political movements across the ideological spectrum have been the settings for a number of well-known novels, such as Stendahl’s The Red and the Black (1830), Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1872), Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886), Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), André Malraux’s Man’s Fate (1933), Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine (1936), Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1939), Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957) Yukio Mishima’s After the Banquet (1960), Raymond Abellio’s The Tower of Babel (1962), Dominique de Roux’s The Fifth Empire (1977), and many others.

Experiences Of Oppression Or Marginalization And Protest

Many political novels are written from within or against experiences of marginalization, oppression, colonization, protest, nationalism, and revolution, and they include feminist, racial and ethnic, gay, and postcolonial fiction. A few examples of these are Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Richard Wr ight’s Native Son (1940), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962), Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Alejo Carpentier’s Reasons of State (1974), V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979), Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter (1979), Athol Fugard’s Totsi (1980), and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981).

The tangible impact of fiction on political change has also been explored in evaluations of such novels as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook (1852), Upton Sinclar’s The Jungle (1906), Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara (1931), and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988).

Utopian And Distopian Novels

Among the most popular of political novels are those identified as utopian or dystopian fiction, beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Denis Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772) and including Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1927), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Ernest Jünger’s The Glass Bees (1957), Monique Wittig’s The Guerillas (1969), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005).

Many utopian or dystopian novels overlap with science fiction, which has often been regarded as an important source of political novels. Kingsley Amis drew the attention of literary critics to this aspect of science fiction in 1960. A scholarly literature is emerging in which students of political theory examine science fiction. Such prominent science fiction authors as H. G.Wells, Frederik Pohl, Robert A. Heinlein, Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, and Kim Stanley Robinson are objects of critical discussion.

The American Political Science Association has a Politics, Literature, and Film section. An indispensable resource for the study of relations between politics and literature is a three-volume encyclopedia containing entries on authors, literary movements, issues, and critical perspectives published in 2005 by Greenwood Press.

The role of fiction as an expression of and commentary on the political conditions of human existence is both older than the political novel and continues to be exhibited in the political novel. As the twenty-first century unfolds, political novels will without a doubt continue to be vehicles by means of which the responses of persons to their political situations are articulated, and by means of which political thinking and action will be stimulated.

Bibliography:

Booker, M. Keith, ed. Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.
Crick, Bernard. Essays on Politics and Literature. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1989.
Davis, Lennard J. Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Hanne, Michael. The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change, Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1994.
Horton, John, and Andrea T. Baumeister, eds. Literature and the Political Imagination. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Howe, Irving. Politics and the Novel. New York: Horizon Press, 1957.
Hughes, H. Stuart. Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930. New York: Knopf, 1958.
Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
McCarthy, Mary. “The Lasting Power of the Political Novel.” New York Times Book Review, January 1, 1984. www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/26/ specials/mccarthy-political.html.
Speare, Morris Edmund. The Political Novel: Its Development in England and in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1924.

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