This is a list primarily of books of political, social and cultural criticism on imaginative literature, the novel in particular – some landmarks and assorted works, mainly American and English – a truncated and otherwise incomplete chronology. A few texts on novel form and technique are also included. See links for excerpts.
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1858 Hippolyte Taine Balzac: A Critical Study
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~1860 C. A. Sainte-Beuve Literary Criticism of Sainte-Beuve [a collection first published in 1971; edited and translated by E. R. Marks]
1863 Hippolyte Taine History of English Literature
1864 Matthew Arnold Essays Literary and Critical [published in periodicals, 1863-1864] [1906 edition]
1864 Victor Hugo William Shakespeare
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1875 Leslie Stephen Hours in a Library
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1883 William Morris On Art And Socialism [essays, 1877-1896; collected 1999] [“Art under Plutocracy”…]
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1891 William Dean Howells Criticism and Fiction
1896 John Colin Dunlop History of Prose Fiction; Volumes I and II [revised by Henry Wilson, 1970]
1896 George Saintsbury A History of Nineteenth Century Literature
1897 Arlo Bates Talks on the Study of Literature
1897 H. D. Traill The New Fiction and Other Essays on Literary Subjects [reprint 1970]
1898 Leo Tolstoy What Is Art? [and Essays on Art; published together, 1962]
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1900 George Saintsbury A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe: From the Earliest Texts to the Present Day [1902, 1904 – Vols. 2 & 3]
1903 Frank Norris The Responsibilities of the Novelist [“The Novel with a Purpose,” “The Need of a Literary Conscience”…]
1906 Arlo Bates Talks on the Teaching of Literature
1908 George Saintsbury A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day
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1914 Emma Goldman The Social Significance of the Modern Drama
1915 Upton Sinclair, Ed. The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest [updated 1996]
1918 W. L. George Literary Chapters
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1920 Randolph Bourne The History of a Literary Radical and Other Papers
1920 Georg Lukacs The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature [“The Novel as Polemic”…]
1921 Percy Lubbock The Craft of Fiction
1923 D. H. Lawrence Studies in Classic American Literature
1924 Floyd Dell Literature and the Machine Age
1924 Morris Edmund Speare The Political Novel: Its Development in England and America
1924 Leon Trotsky Literature and Revolution [“Pre-revolutionary Art,” “Revolutionary and Socialist Art”…]
1924 Edith Wharton The Writing of Fiction
1925 V. F. Calverton The Newer Spirit: A Sociological Criticism of Literature
1925 Alain Locke, Ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation [“The New Negro,” “Negro Art and American,” “The Negro in American Literature”…]
1925 John Macy The Story of the World’s Literature [revised, 1932]
1925 I. A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism [“Art, Play, and Civilisation”…]
1925 Upton Sinclair Mammonart
1925 Virginia Woolf The Common Reader: First Series [“Modern Fiction”…]
1926 W.E.B. DuBois The Oxford W.E.B DuBois Reader [1996] [1921-1926: “Negro Art,” “Negro Art and Literature,” “Criteria of Negro Art”…]
1926 Floyd Dell Intellectual Vagabondage [reprinted, 1990]
1927 E. M. Forster Aspects of the Novel
1927 Van Wyck Brooks, Ed., et al The American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature
1927 Vernon Louis Parrington Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920
1927 Upton Sinclair Money Writes
1928 Julien Benda The Betrayal [Treason] of the Intellectuals [“The Modern Perfecting of Political Passions,” “Nature of Political Passions”…]
1928 Alfred Kreymborg, Ed., et al The Second American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature
1928 Rebecca West The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews
1928 T. K. Whipple Spokesmen [reprinted in 1963 with a foreword by Mark Schorer]
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1930 Ransom, Tate, Warren, et al I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners
1931 Edmund Wilson Axel’s Castle: A Study in Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
1932 V. F. Calverton The Liberation of American Literature [“The Puritan Myth,” “From Revolution to Reaction,” “…Nationalism,” “Liberation”…]
1932 Virginia Woolf The Second Common Reader [“How Should One Read a Book?”…]
1933 Granville Hicks The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War
1934 John Dewey Art as Experience [“Art and Civilization”…]
1934 Max Eastman Art and the Life of Action (With Other Essays) [“The Artist and the Social Engineer”…]
1934 Max Eastman Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism [“The New American Literature,” “The Marxian Aesthetics”…]
1934 Henry James The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces
1935 Granville Hicks, Ed., et al Proletarian Literature in the United States [“Introduction,” Joseph Freeman, “…Problems of Revolutionary Literature”…]
1936 T. S. Eliot Essays Ancient and Modern [“Religion and Literature,” “Modern Education and the Classics”…]
1936 James T. Farrell A Note on Literary Criticism [“Literature and Propaganda,” “Left-Wing Dualism,” “Marx on the Relative Aesthetic”…]
1936 Allen Tate Reactionary Essays
1937 Mary M. Colum From These Roots: The Ideas that Have Made Modern Literature [reprinted, 1967]
1937 Morton D. Zabel, Ed. Literary Opinion in America; Volumes I and II. [revised, 1962]
1937 Herbert Read Art and Society
1938 Edmund Wilson The Triple Thinkers [revised, 1948; corrected, 1963] [“The Politics of Flaubert,” “Historical Interpretation of Literature”…]
1939 Granville Hicks Figures of Transition: A Study of British Literature at the End of the 19th Century [“Socialism and William Morris”…]
1939 Bernard L. Smith Forces in American Criticism: A Study in the History of American Literary Thought [“The Rise of Critical Traditions”…]
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1940 Roger Dataller The Plain Man and the Novel [“The Novel as Propaganda,” “The Historical Novel,” “The Social Novel”…]
1941 Joseph Warren Beach American Fiction, 1920-1940 [“John Steinbeck: Art and Propaganda”…]
1941 Kenneth Burke The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action [revised, 1973] [“The Nature of Art Under Capitalism”…]
1941 Van Wyck Brooks On Literature Today
1941 Sterling A. Brown, Ed., et al The Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes [new introduction by Lester, 1969]
1941 Edmund Wilson The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature [revised, 1952]
1942 Alfred Kazin On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature [“Criticism at the Poles”…]
1943 Herbert Read The Politics of the Unpolitical
1943 Edmund Wilson, Ed. The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It;
Volumes I and II [revised, 1955]
1946 Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
1946 Alex Comfort Art and Social Responsibility: Lectures on the Ideology of Romanticism
1946 George Orwell Dickens, Dali and Others
1946 George Orwell “Why I Write,” in A Collection of Essays, 1954
1946 Mark Schorer William Blake: The Politics of Vision
1947 E.B. Burgum The Novel and the World’s Dilemma
1947 Engels and Marx Literature and Art: Selections from Their Writings
1947 Maxwell Geismar Writers in Crisis: The American Novel, 1925-1940
1947 Stanley Edgar Hyman The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism [revised, 1955] [“The Ideal Critic,” “The Actual Critic”…]
1947 Herbert Read The Grass Roots of Art: Lectures on Social Aspects of Art in an Industrial Age
1947 Herbert Read Education Through Art
1948 Walter Allen Writers on Writing [“The Ends and Uses of Poetry,” “The Novelist’s Responsibility”…]
1948 Alex Comfort The Novel and Our Time [“The Concept of Responsibility”…]
1948 F. R. Leavis The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad
1948 Mark Schorer, Ed., et al Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgement
1949 Maxwell Geismar The Last of the Provincials: The American Novel, 1915-1925
1949 H. L. Mencken A Mencken Chrestomathy [Essays, 1916-1948] “The Critical Process,” etc.
1949 Edwin Muir Essays on Literature and Society [Enlarged and Revised, 1965]
1949 Wellek and Warren Theory of Literature [“Literature and Society”…]
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1950 Gilbert Highet The Art of Teaching [“Authors and Artists”…]
1950 Lionel Trilling The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society [“The Meaning of a Literary Idea”…]
1952 Edmund Wilson A Literary Chronicle: 1920-1950
1952 Edmund Wilson The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the 1920s and 1930s [“Literary Class War,” “American Critics, Left and Right”…]
1953 M. H. Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
1953 Isaiah Berlin The Hedgehog and the Fox [Revised, 1978]
1953 Van Wyck Brooks The Writer in America
1953 Harold C. Gardiner, S.J. Norms for the Novel [“Literature as a Moral Activity, …as Fundamentally Religious, …as Inspiration”…]
1953 Maxwell Geismar Rebels and Ancestors: The American Novel, 1890-1915 [“Jack London”…]
1953 Gilbert Highet Juvenal the Satirist
1954 Walter Allen The English Novel: A Short Critical History
1955 James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son [“Everybody’s Protest Novel”…]
1955 Joseph L. Blotner The Political Novel
1956 J. M. Cohen A History of Western Literature
1956 Frank O’Connor The Mirror in the Roadway: A Study of the Modern Novel
1956 Walter B. Rideout The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society [“Class War”…]
1957 Richard Chase The American Novel and Its Tradition [“Norris and Naturalism”…]
1957 Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism
1957 Granville Hicks, Ed. The Living Novel: A Symposium [“Ralph Ellison: Society, Morality, and the Novel”…]
1957 Irving Howe Politics and the Novel [“The Idea of the Political Novel,” “Orwell: History as Nightmare”…]
1957 Wright Morris The Territory Ahead: Critical Interpretations in American Literature
1957 Philip Rahv, Ed. Literature in America: An Anthology of Literary Criticism
1957 Ian Watt The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding
1957 Rebecca West The Court and the Castle: A Study of the Interactions of Religious and Political Ideas in Imaginative Literature
1957 Wimsatt and Brooks Literary Criticism: A Short History [“The Real and the Social: Art as Propaganda”…]
1958 M. H. Abrams, Ed. Literature and Belief: English Institute Essays, 1957
1958 Malcolm Cowley, Ed. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series
1958 Edmund Fuller Man in Modern Fiction: Some Minority Opinions on Contemporary American Writing
1958 Maxwell Geismar American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity [“Higher and Higher Criticism,” “The ‘End’ of Naturalism”…]
1959 Miriam Allott Novelists on the Novel [“No Politics?” (Stendhal), “The Writer’s Responsibility” (G. Eliot), “Ethics of the Novel” (various)…]
1959 William R. Mueller The Prophetic Voice in Modern Fiction: Major Writings of Joyce, Camus, Kafka, Silone, Faulkner, Green
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1960 Leslie A. Fiedler Love and Death in the American Novel [revised 1966]
1961 Daniel Aaron Writers on the Left
1961 Adler and Cain, Eds. Imaginative Literature I: From Homer to Shakespeare
1961 Wayne C. Booth The Rhetoric of Fiction
1961 Ihab Hassan Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel
1961 Mary McCarthy On the Contrary [“Politics and the Social Scene,” “The Fact in Fiction”…]
1961 Rubin and Moore, Eds. The Idea of an American Novel
1962 Adler and Cain, Eds. Imaginative Literature II: From Cervantes to Dostoevsky
1962 Maxwell Geismar Henry James and the Jacobites
1962 Gregor and Nicholas The Moral and the Story
1962 Alvin B. Kernan Modern Satire [“Philip Wylie: A Specimen American Institution”…]
1962 Edwin Muir The Estate of Poetry [“The Public and the Poet,” “The Natural Estate,” “Criticism and the Poet”…]
1963 Donohue and Algren Conversations with Nelson Algren [“Where is the American Radical?” “The Open Society”…]
1963 Northrop Frye The Well-Tempered Critic
1963 Vernon Hall, Jr. A Short History of Literary Criticism
1963 Eloise K. Hay The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study
1963 Frank O’Connor The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story
1963 Robert E. Spiller, Ed., et al Literary History of the United States: History [“Fiction and Social Debate,” “The Hope of Reform,” “Battle of the Books”…]
1964 Walter Allen Tradition and Dream: The English and American Novel From the Twenties to Our Time
1964 Ralph Ellison Shadow and Act
1964 Alberto S. Florentino Literature and Society: A Symposium on the Relation of Literature to Social Change
1964 Northrop Frye The Educated Imagination
1964 Michael Millgate American Social Fiction: James to Cozzens
1964 R. H. Tawney The Radical Tradition: Twelve Essays on Politics, Education, Literature [“Social History and Literature”…]
1966 Joseph L. Blotner The Modern American Political Novel: 1900-1960 [“The Novel of the Future,” “The Role of Woman,” “American Fascism”…]
1966 Gordon Milne The American Political Novel
1966 Scholes and Kellogg The Nature of Narrative
1967 Louis Kampf On Modernism: The Prospects for Literature and Freedom
1967 Connor Cruise O’Brien Writers and Politics: Essays and Criticisms
1967 Herbert Read Art and Alienation: The Role of the Artist in Society [“The Function of the Arts in Contemporary Society,” “Van Gogh…”…]
1967 Louis D. Rubin The Teller in the Tale
1967 George Steiner Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman [“Marxism and Literature”…]
1968 Jose Ortega Y. Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature
1968 Arthur Pollard Anthony Trollope’s Political Novels
1968 Mark Schorer The World We Imagine: Selected Essays
1969 Joseph North The New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties [“The Writer and Society,” “Writing and War”…]
1969 Flannery O’Connor Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose [“The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” “Novelist and Believer”…]
1969 Kenneth Rexroth Classics Revisited
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1970 Maxwell Geismar Mark Twain: An American Prophet [“The Enraged Radical”…]
1970 Kampf and Lauter, Eds. The Politics of Literature: Dissenting Essays on the Teaching of English
1970 George Perkins, Ed. The Theory of the American Novel [“Frank Norris: The Novel with a Purpose”…]
1970 Kenneth Rexroth The Alternative Society: Essays from the Other World
1970 Raymond Williams The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence
1971 Hazard Adams, Ed. Critical Theory Since Plato
1971 Sheila Delany, Ed. Counter-Tradition: The Literature of Dissent and Alternatives
1971 Jonah Raskin The Mythology of Imperialism [“Chaos: The Culture of Imperialism,” “Portrait of the Artist as Imperialist”…]
1971 Judy Kay Ferguson Salinas Social Reform in Selected Works of Carlos Fuentes
1971 Elaine Showalter Women’s Liberation and Literature
1972 David Lodge Twentieth Century Literary Criticism [“Politics and the English Language” (Orwell), “Why Write?” (Sartre)…]
1972 Norman Philbrick, Ed. Trumpets Sounding: Propaganda Plays Of The American Revolution
1973 Richard Kostelanetz The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America
1974 Jo David Bellamy The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers
1974 David Craig The Real Foundations: Literature and Social Change
1974 Greenberg and Warrick Political Science Fiction: An Introductory Reader
1974 John Halperin, Ed. The Theory of the Novel: New Essays
1975 Ian Boyd The Novels Of G.K. Chesterton: A Study In Art And Propaganda
1975 Terry Eagleton Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory [“Ideology and Literary Form,” “Marxism and Aesthetic Value”…]
1975 Lucien Goldmann Towards a Sociology of the Novel [English translation]
1975 Phillip Roth Reading Myself and Others [expanded, 2001] [“Writing American Fiction”…]
1976 Terry Eagleton Marxism and Literary Criticism [“The Writer and Commitment,” “The Author as Producer”…]
1976 Gilbert Highet The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning
1976 Richard Ohmann English in American: A Radical View of the Profession [updated 1996] [“The Politics of Knowledge: A Polemic”…]
1976 Norman Rudich Weapons of Criticism: Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition
1976 David C. Stineback Shifting World: Social Change and Nostalgia in the American Novel
1976 Mas’ud Zavarzadeh The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel
1977 Mary Lee Bundy Guide to the Literature of Social Change: Volume 1
1977 Bob Dixon Catching Them Young 1: Sex, Race and Class in Children’s Fiction
1977 Bob Dixon Catching Them Young 2: Political Ideas in Children’s Fiction
1977 Herbert Marcuse The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics
1977 Mark Spilka Towards a Poetics of Fiction: Essays from Novel—A Forum on Fiction, 1967-1976
1977 Diana Trilling We Must March My Darlings
1977 Raymond Williams Marxism and Literature
1978 John Colmer Coleridge to Catch-22: Images of Society [“Utopian Fanatasy,” “Protest and Anti-War Literature”…]
1978 John Gardner On Moral Fiction
1978 Josephine Hendin Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945
1978 Tillie Olsen Silences [“Rebecca Harding Davis”…]
1978 Philip Rahv Essays on Literature and Politics, 1932-1972
1978 Edward Said Orientalism
1978 David Smith Socialist Propaganda In The Twentieth-Century Novel
1978 Eudora Welty The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews [“Must the Novelist Crusade?”]
1979 Johnson and Johnson Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century
1979 Raghuvir Sinah Social Change in Contemporary Literature
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1980 Frank Lentricchia After the New Criticism
1980/85 Ira A. Levine Left-Wing Dramatic Theory in the American Theatre
1980 John Lucas The Literature of Change: Studies in the Nineteenth Century Provincial Novel
1980 Mary McCarthy Ideas and the Novel
1981 M. M. Bakhtin The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays [English translation] [ “Discourse in the Novel”…]
1981 Rosemary Jackson Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion
1982 Margaret Atwood Second Words: Selected Critical Prose [“Amnesty International: An Address”…]
1983 Malcolm Bradbury The Modern American Novel [revised edition, 1992: novels 1890-1990s]
1983 Terry Eagleton Literary Theory: An Introduction [“Conclusion: Political Criticism”…”]
1983 A. P. Foulkes Literature And Propaganda [“What is Propaganda?” “…Literary Communication,” “Fiction and Reality”…]
1983 John J. Michalczyk Costa-Gavras: The Political Fiction Film
1983 Nicholas Pronay, Ed. Propaganda, Politics And Film, 1918-45
1983 Susan Rubin Suleiman Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre
1983 Janet Todd, Ed. Women Writers Talking
1984 Robert Alter Motives for Fiction [“…American Political Novel,” “History…New American Novel,” “Literature and Ideology in the Thirties”…]
1984 Madeline Moore The Short Season Between Two Silences: The Mystical and the Political in the Novels of Virginia Woolf
1984 Christopher Pawling Popular Fiction and Social Change
1984 Charles Ruas Conversations with American Writers
1984 H. Trivedi American Political Novel
1984 Michael Wilding Political Fictions [“1984: Rewriting the Future,” “News From Nowhere,” “The Iron Heel,” “…Huckleberry Finn”…]
1985 Robert Boyers Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945 [“Toward a Reading of Political Novels”…]
1985 Malcolm Cowley The Flower and the Leaf: A Contemporary Record of American Writing Since 1941
1985 Wallace Gray Homer to Joyce: Interpretations of the Classic Works of Western Literature
1985 Mary McCarthy Occasional Prose [“Politics and the Novel,” “ ‘Democracy’ ”…]
1985 Judith Newton Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture
1985 Emmanuel Ngara Art And Ideology In The African Novel: A Study Of The Influence Of Marxism On African Writing
1985 Mona Scheuermann Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel
1985 Elaine Showalter, Ed. The New Feminist Criticism: …Women, Literature, Theory [“…Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History”…]
1985 Michael Spindler American Literature and Social Change: William Dean Howells to Arthur Miller
1985 Jane P. Tompkins Sensational Designs
1986 Ralph Ellison Going to the Territory
1986 Barbara Foley Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction
1986 Hobbs and Woodard, Eds. Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Art and Social Change
1986 Milan Kundera The Art of the Novel
1986 Russell Reising The Unusable Past: Theory and Study of American Literature [“The Apolitical Unconscious: Leslie Fiedler”…]
1986 Judi M. Roller The Politics of the Feminist Novel
1986 Thomas Daniel Young, Ed. Conversations with Malcolm Cowley
1987 Nancy Armstrong Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
1987 Miklόs Haraszti The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism
1987 Tom Kemme Political Fiction, The Spirit of the Age, and Allen Drury
1987 Richard Ohmann The Politics of Letters
1987 Irme Salusinszky Criticism in Society: Interviews with Derrida, Frye, Bloom, Hartman, Kermode, Said, Johnson, Lentricchia, Miller
1988 K. E. Agovi Novels of Social Change
1988 Rosemarie Bodenheimer The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction
1988 Mary Chamberlain, Ed. Writing Lives: Conversations Between Women Writers
1988 Terrence Des Pres Praises and Dispraises: Poetry and Politics, the 20th Century [“Political Intrusion”…]
1988 Emory Elliott, Ed. Columbia Literary History of the United States
1988 Nadine Gordimer The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places
1988 Hoffman and Murphy, Eds. Essentials of the Theory of Fiction
1988 Amy Kaplan The Social Construction of American Realism
1988 Vincent B. Leitch American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties [“Leftist Criticism From the 1960s to the 1980s”…]
1988 J. Michael Lennon Conversations with Norman Mailer
1988 David Lodge, Ed. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader [updated 2000, with Nigel Wood]
1988 George Plimpton, Ed. Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews [revised edition, 1998]
1988 Yanarella and Sigelman Political Mythology and Popular Fiction
1989 Peter Buitenhuis The Great War Of Words: British, American, And Canadian Propaganda And Fiction, 1914-1933
1989 Cathy N. Davidson, Ed. Reading in American: Literature and Social History
1989 Rita Felski Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change
1989 Marie-Lise Gazarian Gautier Interviews with Latin American Writers
1989 Linda Hutcheon The Politics of Postmodernism
1989 Kenneth Rexroth More Classics Revisited
1989 John Rodden The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St. George” Orwell
1989 Standley and Pratt, Eds. Conversations with James Baldwin
1989 D. J. Taylor A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s [“Writers, Politics and Society,” “Outside the Whale”…]
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1990 Bardes and Gossett Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
1990 Malcolm Cowley The Portable Malcolm Cowley
1990 Eagleton, Jameson, Said Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature
1990 Lee Horsley Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination
1990 Pearlman and Henderson A Voice of One’s Own: Conversations with America’s Writing Women
1990 Ishmael Reed Writin’ is Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper
1990 Claudia Tate Black Women Writers at Work [Angelou, Bambara, Brooks, Deveaux, Jones, Lorde, Morrison, Sanchez, Walker, etc…]
1991 Arac and Ritvo, Eds. Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature
1991 Best and Kellner Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations [“Marxism, Feminism…Political Postmodernism,” “…Critical Social Theory”…]
1991 Carol Gelderman, Ed. Conversations with Mary McCarthy
1991 Christopher T. Harvie The Centre of Things: Political Fiction in Britain from Disraeli to the Present
1991 Philomena Mariani Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing [“The Novel’s Next Step” by Maxine Hong Kingston (“Global novel”)]
1991 Paula Rabinowitz Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression American
1991 Margaret Randall Walking to the Edge: Essays of Resistance [“Art as Information”…]
1991 Ruland and Bradbury From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature [“Muckrakers…” “Radical Reassessments”…]
1991 Thomas H. Schaub American Fiction in the Cold War
1992 David Cayley Northrop Frye in Conversation
1992 Morris Dickstein Double Agent: The Critic and Society
1992 Jane DeRose Evans The Art Of Persuasion: Political Propaganda From Aeneas To Brutus
1992 Maureen Whitebrook Ed. Reading Political Stories: Representations of Politics in Novels and Pictures
1992 Winn and Alexander, Eds. The Slaughter-House of Mammon: An Anthology of Victorian Social Protest Literature
1993 Barbara Foley Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 [“Art or Propaganda?” “…Didacticism”…]
1993 Toni Morrison Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
1993 Tobin Siebers Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism
1993 Gore Vidal United States: Essays 1952-1992
1994 Dorothy Allison Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature [“Believing in Literature”…]
1994 Carol Becker, Ed. The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility [“Decolonizing the Imagination”…]
1994 Harold Bloom The Western Canon
1994 G. W. Bowersock Fiction as History: Nero to Julian
1994 Richard Chapple, Ed. Social and Political Change in Literature and Film
1994 Michael Hanne Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change [revised edition, 1996?]
1994 H. L. Mencken A Second Mencken Chrestomathy [Essays, 1916-1948]
1994 Edward Said Culture and Imperialism
1994 Edward Said Representations of the Intellectuals [“Speaking Truth to Power”…]
1994 Williams and Chrisman, Eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader
1995 Becker and Wiens, Eds. The Artist in Society: Rights, Roles, and Responsibilities [“…the Crisis of Democracy,” “Democracy and…the Artist”…]
1995 David Bell Ardent Propaganda: Miners’ Novels And Class Conflict 1929-1939
1995 Dick and Singh, Eds. Conversations with Ishmael Reed
1995 Mark Edmundson Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defense of Poetry
1995 Stanley Fish Political Correctness: Studies and Political Change [“Disciplinary Tasks and Political Intentions”…]
1995 Sharon M. Harris, Ed. Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797-1901 [“Literary Politics and the Political Novel”…]
1995 Alfred Kazin Writing Was Everything
1995 Judith K. Proud Children And Propaganda: Fiction And Fairy Tale In Vichy France
1995 Anne C. Ruderman The Pleasures of Virtue: Political Thought in the Novels of Jane Austen
1995 Mary Ellen Snodgrass Encyclopedia of Utopian Literature
1996 Nelson Algren Nonconformity: Writing on Writing
1996 Josephine M. Guy The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual, and Communal Life
1996 Horton and Baumeister Literature and the Political Imagination
1996 Russell Reising Loose Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American Social Text [“The Political Work of Disney’s Dumbo”…]
1996 David H. Richter Narrative/Theory [“Richard Wright: ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’ ”…]
1996 Nora Ruth Roberts Three Radical Women Writers: Class and Gender in Meridel le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Josephine Herbst
1996 Mary Ellen Snodgrass Encyclopedia of Satirical Literature
1997 Toby Clark Art And Propaganda In The Twentieth Century: The Political Image In The Age Of Mass Culture
1997 Mark Edmundson Nightmare on Elm Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of the Gothic
1997 Bettina Friedl, Ed. On To Victory: Propaganda Plays Of The Woman Suffrage Movement
1997 Nibir K. Ghosh Calculus of Power: Modern American Political Novel
1997 Hassler and Wilcox, Eds. Political Science Fiction
1998 James Baldwin Collected Essays [selections, beginning 1949]
1998 Robert Cole, Ed. International Encyclopedia Of Propaganda
1998 Ursula Lord Solitude Versus Solidarity in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: Political and Epistemological Implications of Narrative…
1998 Richard Rorty Achieving Our Country [“The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature”…]
1998 Alice Walker Anything We Love Can Be Saved
1998 John Whalen-Bridge Political Fiction and the American Self [“The Problem of the American Political Novel”…]
1998 Mary Whitby Propaganda Of Power: The Role Of Panegyric In Late Antiquity
1999 Dorrit Cohn The Distinction of Fiction
1999 Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ed. African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 [“1895-1954: Art or Propaganda?” “1955-1975: Cultural Autonomy…”…]
1999 Robert Fulford The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture [“Literature of the Streets…the Shaping of News”…]
1999 Gordon Hutner, Ed. American Literature, American Culture [“Everybody’s Protest Novel” (J. Baldwin), “Harriet Beecher Stowe” (E. Wilson)”…]
1999 Clifford Siskin The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830
1999 Nuria Vilanova Social Change and Literature in Peru: 1970-1990
1999 James Wood The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief [“Legacy of…Renan and…Arnold,” “Against Paranoia:…Don DeLillo”]
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2000 Joan Acocella Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism [“Politics and Criticism”…]
2000 Camille Bacon-Smith Science Fiction Culture
2000 H. Bruce Franklin Vietnam and Other American Fantasies
2000 Christopher Hitchens Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
2000 Kathryn Hume American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction Since 1960 [“The Fragility of Democracy”…]
2000 David Laskin Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals
2000 Michael McKeon, Ed. Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach
2000 Laura Miller The salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors: …The Most Fascinating Writers of Our Time
2000 Winston Napier, Ed. African American Literary Theory: A Reader
2000 Christina Stansell American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century;
2000 Lionel Trilling The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent: Selected Essays
2001 Susan Johnston Women and Domestic Experience in Victorian Political Fiction
2001 Elizabeth Maslen Political and Social Issues in British Women’s Fiction, 1928-1968
2001 Elizabeth Morgan Aeroplane Mirrors: Personal and Political Reflexivity in Post-Colonial Women’s Novels
2001 Margaret Scanlan Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction
2002 Bill Ashcroft, et. al. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures
2002 Margaret Atwood Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
2002 Brenda Ayers Frances Trollope and the Novel of Social Change
2002 Maxwell Geismar Reluctant Radical: A Memoir [“From Liberalism to Radicalism”…]
2002 Karin Verena Gunnemann Heinrich Mann’s Novels and Essays: The Artist as Political Educator
2002 Amy Kaplan The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture [“Romancing the Empire”…]
2002 B. R. Meyers A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose
2002 Louis Pizzitola Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, And Propaganda In The Movies
2003 Ralph Ellison The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
2003 H. Bruce Franklin Introduction to The Iron Heel by Jack London
2003 Marjorie Garber A Manifesto for Literary Studies
2003 Thomas J. Kemme Patterns of Power in American Political Fiction
2003 Todd Oakley Lutes Shipwreck and Deliverance: Politics, Culture and Modernity in the novels of [Paz, Marquez and Llosa]
2003 George Plimpton, Ed. Latin American Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews
2003 Howard Zinn Artists in Times of War and Other Essays
note: I agree with much but not everything I’ve chosen to excerpt. As far as the books as a whole go – as they seem to me – many are very good, plenty are solid, some are mixed, some are less insightful or unfortunate in part. On the whole, in my judgment, the books make some thoughtful and useful exploration of imaginative literature and its relation to society, individuals and social and political change.
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See also:
by Tony Christini
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A Practical Policy 