Critical discussions of the novel of ideas have often asked us to take seriously the ideas articulated by fictional characters, and assumed that these ideas are sincerely held by those characters. This is in fact a good description of the serious novel of ideas, whose formal dynamics can be mapped onto theories of tragedy by Hegel, Lukács, and David Scott. But often, comedy and hypocrisy disrupt the presumed continuity between public utterances and private convictions or behaviours. This also often involves disrupting essentialist conceptions of identity and group belonging. Through readings of novels by Rose Macaulay, Doris Lessing, Jonathan Coe and Jeanette Winterson, this chapter argues that comic novels of ideas thrive on such discontinuities, diffusing and deflating identity categories as well as tragic collisions, and offering a distinctive orientation towards discursive liberalism as the primary medium of politics.

Gay, lesbian, and trans rights movements had similar social, cultural, and political goals, the latter of which included changing laws and policies in order to gain new rights, benefits, and protections from harm, goals which are sought both in the civil and political spheres. The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s marked a new era for gay political activism and the emergence of lesbian direct action groups, such as Lesbian Avengers (1992). In the UK, Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1986, which banned mention of homosexuality in schools, sharpened the need for political organising and resistance. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Gender Recognition Act (2004) in the UK restored some of the rights lost to trans people in the previous century. This chapter explores the relationship between late twentieth-century literature and sexual rights. It asks what a book can do to advance the political case for sexual rights, as well as showing how a book might provide a much-needed textual space for self-imagining and self-determination, for the sexual or gender minority subject literally written out of the socio-cultural and political mainstream.