The novel of ideas is an important form that is both under-theorised and largely neglected in accounts of the development of the novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book sets out the history of this critical hostility, which took hold as the aesthetic protocols of literary modernism became established among key literary tastemakers in Britain. It then proposes a revaluation and a critical reclamation of the novel of ideas, showcasing a range of perceptive, sympathetic, and sensitive ways of reading novels in which discursive argumentation is foregrounded and where the clash of ideas is vital to the novelistic effect. Through thematic chapters as well as new accounts of key novelists in the British tradition-including George Eliot, H. G. Wells, Doris Lessing and Kamila Shamsie-this book repositions the novel of ideas as a major form in modern British literature.

Surveying the relationship between American politics and the twentieth-century novel, this volume analyzes how political movements, ideas, and events shaped the American novel. It also shows how those political phenomena were shaped in turn by long-form prose fiction. The book is made up of three major sections. The first section considers philosophical ideologies and broad political movements that were both politically and literarily significant in the twentieth-century United States, including progressive liberalism, conservatism, socialism and communism, feminism, and Black liberation movements. The second section analyzes the evolving political valences of key popular genres and literary forms in the twentieth-century American novel, focusing on crime fiction, science fiction, postmodern metafiction and immigrant fiction. The third section examines ten diverse politically-minded novels that serve as exemplary case studies across the century. Combining detailed literary analysis with innovative political theory, this Companion provides a groundbreaking study of the politics of twentieth-century American fiction.

This book argues that modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf engaged creatively with modernity's expanding forms of collective experience and performative identities. Judith Paltin compares patterns of crowds in modernist Anglophone literature to historical arrangements and theories of democratic assembly to argue that an abstract construction of the crowd engages with the transformation of popular subjectivity from a nineteenth-century liberal citizenry to the contemporary sense of a range of political multitudes struggling with intersectional conditions of oppression and precarity. Modernist works, many of which were composed during the ascendancy of fascism and other populist politics claiming to be based on the action of the crowd, frequently stage the crowd as a primal scene for violence; at the same time, they posit a counterforce in more agile collective gatherings which clarify the changing relations in literary modernity between subjects and power.