Politics and the Novel

Irving Howes classic investigation of the role of revolutionary ideas in fiction is here reprinted in a new paperback edition. In establishing the role of the political novel and tracing its growth into the twentieth century, Mr. Howe draws his examples from Stendhals The Red and the Black, Dostoevskys The Possessed, Joseph Conrads The Secret Agent, and Ivan Turgenevs Fathers and Sons. He also explains why American novels failed to integrate ideology, including Henry Adamss Democracy, Henry Jamess The Bostonians, and Nathaniel Hawthornes The Blithedale Romance. His discussion of political fiction after World War II touches on Milan Kunderas The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, V. S. Naipauls A Bend in the River, and Alexander Solzhenitsyns The First Circle, among others. In all, Politics and the Novel offers the most enduring and authoritative view of the subject.