Category: Uncategorized

From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature (with an emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda) 

 

(1964) “American writers have repeatedly been worried, confused, or angered—rarely amused—by the irreconcilability of American ideals and American experience, and one result of this sense of the gulf between the way things should be and the way things are, has been a readiness to regard the novel as a political instrument. English reform movements have tended to be dominated by intellectuals, whose preferred media have been the essay and, occasionally, the problem play. In seeking to achieve radical alterations in society, they have not directly sought mass support; in fact, much of their attention has been directed to the problem of restraining popular unrest and of guiding it into the most profitable channels. …the novels of Ignatius Donnelly, Edward Bellamy, William Dean Howells and many others were the often unsubtle but nonetheless powerful advocates of a wide variety of political doctrines and Utopian dreams. At the end of the nineteenth century, writers such as Gustavus Myers, Jacob Riis, and Lincoln Steffens showed that straight reporting might in certain circumstances be more effective than fiction, but Jack London and Upton Sinclair, more doctrinaire in their approach to social problems, continued to preach socialism through the medium of the novel—presumable because it was wider in its circulation, simpler in its appeal, and less hampered by the discipline of observable fact.

     “In addition to these narrowly political writers there have been the many novelists of social protest. Early in the century there were the ‘muckrakers,’ such as Winston Churchill, William Allen White, Robert Herrick, and Ernest Poole; later came Anderson, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, the ‘proletarians,’ and Norman Mailer. For all the differences between them, such novelists of social protest have at least one thing in common: They approach society not in a responsive or sensitive way but with their minds already made up; they come armed not only with their talents but with a theory. It is of the essence of the novelist’s job that he should impose a pattern upon his material, but these novelists impose a pattern not of art but, in the broadest sense, of politics. “[…] It can be argued that the delineation of society as such is a dubious undertaking for any artist. Again and again the material takes charge, as it does in Dreiser; or the political intention takes charge, as in so many of the novelists of social protest; or there is a tendency for the social material, the ‘information,’ to become separated out from the ostensible action of the novel…. The proper function of social description in a novel must be to define and illuminate the human predicament. This is something which English novelists seem almost automatically to have accepted. Many American novelists have not accepted it, and they have often squandered their powers as a result” (196-200).

     “In the last analysis, what we ask of the social novelist is not so much that he should reflect our view of society, but that he should make us see society his way” (205) and that such novelists “look beyond [the national experience] to the universal human experience of which it is inevitably a part” (212). “In admiring the novels of George Eliot, we need to remember that what seems to us the accuracy of her social observation is in some degree an indication of her greatness as a novelist, of her power to make us accept the image of society she presents. It matters little whether or not William Faulkner’s novels give an ‘accurate’ picture of the South; what matters supremely is that Faulkner presents his South, the world of Yoknapatawpha County, solidly and vividly, both as a setting and as a conditioning environment…” (205).

 

–Michael Millgate, American Social Fiction

 

(1965) “It can be said at once, I should think, that we are all agreed upon the most important point: that morality as shown through human relationships is the whole heart of fiction, and the serious writer has never lived who dealt with anything else. And yet, the zeal to reform, which quite properly inspires the editorial, has never done fiction much good. The exception occurs when it can rise to the intensity of satire, where it finds a better home in the poem or the drama.” 

 

–Eudora Welty, “Must the Novelist Crusade” (1965), in The Eye of the Story (1978)

 

(1978) “A study of the writer as a critic of society that ends with science-fiction fantasies and anti-war novels such as A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch-22 had better acquire what academic respectability it can by starting with the ancient Greeks, with Plato in fact. In Plato’s Republic, that early blueprint for a benevolent dictatorship and first example of Utopian fantasy, no place can be found for the imaginative writer. In justification Plato gives three reasons. The poet, he argues, deals with reality at two removes. He tells lies about the gods and heroes, a complaint that is not difficult to translate into terms that would be applicable to any modern dictatorship. And he appeals to emotions, when he should appeal to man’s noblest faculty, the reason. ‘We shall,’ says Plato ‘bow down before a being with such miraculous powers of giving pleasure; but we shall tell him that we are not allowed to have any such person in our commonwealth; we shall crown him with fillets of wool, anoint his head with myrrh, and conduct him to another country’ (Republic, Book 10). Regretfully, because Plato is certainly not unaware of the sublime powers possessed by the inspired poet, but firmly and magisterially, this stern moral puritan dismisses the poet from his ideal state. Here, then, in Plato’s Republic, we have the first memorable statement of the clash between two ideals of order: the inspired order of the artist and the imposed order of the state, an opposition that permeates Romantic and post-Romantic literature. And in exiling the artist from his ideal state, Plato is the first to create for him that very modern role, the Outsider….

     “The successful critic of society, it may be suggested, is the writer who learns the wisdom of indirection. He is the writer who learns to combine instruction with delight, without in any way compromising his integrity of blunting the force of his social criticism. Some literary forms are especially suited to methods of indirect attack: satire, for example. From the time of the Greeks onwards, satirists have invented a variety of ways to maintain apparent detachment and the indirect approach, while pressing home their attack. The three commonest forms are the beast fable, the imaginary journey, and the Utopian fantasy. The beast fable has been used by the Greek dramatist Aristophanes in the Frogs, by Chaucer in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and by George Orwell in Animal Farm. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels provides a model for the imaginary journey, while the history of literary utopias stretches—to take it no further—from More’s sixteenth-century Utopia, to Butler’s Erewhon (1872), Morris’s News From Nowhere (1891), and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). It is essential for the satirist’s purpose to shock us into seeing our own familiar world through unfamiliar eyes; some radical change of perspective is therefore absolutely necessary. Each of the three devices, the beast fable, the imaginary journey, and Utopian fantasy achieves this end” (1-2).

 

–John Colmer, “The Writer as Critic of Society,” Coleridge to Catch-22: Images of Society

 

(1983) “If we refer to the nineteenth century as the Age of Ideology, then it seems even more appropriate to regard the present century as the Age of Propaganda…. The relationship of literature and art to propaganda is not at all straightforward, and would in any case be dismissed as insignificant by many modern critics, whose evaluative criteria would lead them to make a distinction between ‘real literature’ and ‘tendentious’ writing. Even so, George Orwell, who stated that ‘all art is to some extent propaganda’…, was probably closer to the truth than Hitler, who on one occasion was heard echoing the popular view that ‘art has nothing to do with propaganda’…. Not the least of ironies contained in these seemingly contradictory statements is the fact that Hitler’s remarks were addressed to Josef Goebbels who, as head of the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, had attempted to create a state apparatus for thought control which could have served as a model for the perfect totalitarian state depicted in Orwell’s novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four…. Propaganda does not often come marching towards us waving swastikas and chanting ‘Seig Heil’; its power lies in its capacity to conceal itself, to appear natural, to coalesce completely and indivisibly with the values and accepted power symbols of a given society. When Hitler claimed that art had nothing to do with propaganda he was anticipating a perfectly integrated Nationalist Socialist Germany whose art would spontaneously and unthinkingly reproduce the desired images and perceptions. Even in the early revolutionary period of the Third Reich, Goebbels, who had objected to the word propaganda being used in the title of his Ministry, insisted that ‘news is best given out in such a way that it appears to be without comment but is itself tendentious’…. If a simple principle can be derived from the discussion so far, it is that the recognition of propaganda can be seen as a function of the ideological distance which separates the observer from the act of communication observed…. Hitler’s assertion that art has nothing to do with propaganda does not contradict Orwell’s statement that all art is propaganda, but is rather contained within it, for the propaganda-free art which Hitler envisaged was an art within which the values and beliefs of National Socialism would be dominant, invisible and totally natural. This ‘illusion of pure aestheticism’ was for Orwell a reminder that ‘propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose—a political, social and religious purpose—that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs’…. Although there is no ready-made method for detecting propaganda, we can become aware of the general categories in which it manifests itself and we can attempt to classify its techniques and forms…. This approach does not mean that we must study literature as a set of documents rather than as a set of aesthetic objects. For in effect it denies the validity of such a distinction by assuming that the propagandistic or demystifying moment of literary communication may be inseparable from its aesthetic function….”

 

–A. P. Foulkes, Literature and Propaganda (from the Introduction and Conclusion)

 

1983-1988                                                   EXCERPTS CONTENTS

________________________________________________________________       

Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

  ________________________________________________________________ 

 

From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature
(with an emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda) 

(1983) “In ordinary critical usage, the term ‘roman à thèse’ has a strongly negative connotation; it designates works that are too close to propaganda to be artistically valid. No self-respecting writer would consent to call his novels by that name. A roman à thèse is always the work of an ‘other’… There do exist a few critical studies, published quite a while ago, that discuss [certain] novels…as ‘political novels’ or as examples of ‘committed’ or engagé literature. Neither of these categories corresponds exactly, however, to the roman à thèse. The political novel as a generic category is at once too broad (Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme is, as Irving Howe has shown, a superb political novel, but it is not a roman à thèse) and too narrow (Mauriac’s ‘Catholic novel,’ Le Noeud de vipers, is a roman à thèse, but not a political novel). As for ‘littérature engagée,’ it is too imprecise a term to designate a genre; furthermore, I feel it is too specifically associated with the name of Sartre, who did not invent the term but who made it current—and who, incidentally, went out of his way to distinguish ‘engagé’ novels from roman à these (although it may once again have been a matter of rejecting the name rather than the thing itself)…. As a starting point, I propose the following definition: a roman à thèse is a novel written in the realistic mode (that is, based on an aesthetic of verisimilitude and representation), which signals itself to the reader as primarily didactic in intent, seeking to demonstrate the validity of a political, philosophical, or religious doctrine…. One could…claim that every novel, indeed every work of fiction…, can be read as expounding a ‘thesis,’ to the extent that it is always possible to extract from it a general maxim of some kind…. Following this line of reasoning, one would soon have to conclude that the roman à thèse is everywhere and nowhere—in other words, that it is a phenomenon of reading (viewed from a certain angle, all works are didactic) rather than of writing. At that point, there would be no reason to try to define a genre called roman à thèse, for the concept of genre implies that there exist certain properties that texts have in common, not that (or not only that) there exist certain modes of reading—or as is commonly said nowadays, certain interpretive strategies—that can be applied to any and every text. [However]…I consider undeniable…: there exist nontrivial differences between and among texts, as well as between readers, or between interpretive strategies that readers deploy in order to understand a text. Novels that are roman à thèse have certain identifiable traits which distinguish them from other novels and other genres. One of these traits, and no doubt the most important one is that romans à thèse forumulate, in an insistent, consistent, and unambiguous manner, the thesis (or theses) they seek to illustrate…. Whether its thesis is conservative or radical, defending the status quo or calling for its abolition, the roman à thèse is essentially an authoritarian genre: it appeals to the need for certainty, stability, and unity that is one of the elements of the human psyche; it affirms absolute truths, absolute values” (3-10).

 

(1983) Introductory quotations from Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Authoritarian Fictions:

     “Literature, as it has been understood by all the masters, is an interpretation of life. It eliminates in order to prove.” –Maurice Barrès

     “All literature is propaganda. […] Art, for us, is what makes propaganda effective, what is capable of moving men in the direction we wish. –Paul Nizan

     “Then comes the modern question: why is there not today (or at least so it seems to me), why is there no longer an art of intellectual persuasion, or imagination? Why are we so slow, so indifferent about mobilizing narrative and the image? Can’t we see that it is, after all, works of fiction, no matter how mediocre they may be artistically, that best arouse political passion? –Roland Barthes

     “…it is the very notion of a work created for the expression of a social, political, economic, moral, etc. content that constitutes a lie.”

–Alain Robbe-Grillet

 

 

(1987-1999) “[Orwell’s Problem: how is it that oppressive ideological systems are able to] instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with the obvious facts about the world around us?” “If Orwell, instead of writing 1984—which was actually, in my opinion, his worst book, a kind of trivial caricature of the most totalitarian society in the world, which made him famous and everybody loved him, because it was the official enemy—if instead of doing that easy and relatively unimportant thing, he had done the hard and important thing, namely talk about Orwell’s Problem [as pertains to England and western states], he would not have been famous and honored: he would have been hated and reviled and marginalized.” […]  “About Orwell's 1984, I thought, frankly, it was one of his worst books. Could barely finish it. Some parts (e.g., about Newspeak) were clever. But most of it seemed to me—well, trivial. The problem is not a very interesting one; the modes of thought control and repression in totalitarian societies are fairly transparent. In fact, they often tend to be rather lax. Franco Spain, for example, didn't care much what people thought and said: the screams from the torture chamber in downtown Madrid were enough to keep the lid on. It's not too well known, but the Soviet Union was also pretty lax, particularly in the Brezhnev era. According to US government-Russian Research Center studies, Russians apparently had considerably wider access to a broad range of opinion and to dissident literature than Americans do, not because it is denied them but because propaganda is so much more effective here. Orwell was well aware of these issues. His (suppressed) introduction to Animal Farm, for example, deals explicitly with "literary censorship in England." To write about that topic would have been important, hard, and serious—and would have earned him the obloquy that attends departure from the rules.

     “Caricature can be very well done. Swift is marvelous, for example. Animal Farm is pretty good, in my opinion. But 1984 I thought was a serious decline from his best work. Caricature is an art, and not an easy one. But when well done, a very important one. As for dealing with Orwell's problem, I try to do it in the ways I know how to pursue; 1000s of pages by now. No doubt there are other ways, maybe better ways. But others will have to find what works for them. …my co-author Edward Herman has done excellent work of caricature on Orwell's problem. I am thinking of his work on "doublespeak," including a book, modeled more or less on Ambrose Bierce.” 

 

“If you want to learn about people’s personalities and intentions, you would probably do better reading novels than reading psychology books. Maybe that’s the best way to come to an understanding of human beings and the way they act and feel, but that’s not science. Science isn’t the only thing in the world, it is what it is…science is not the only way to come to an understanding of things.” “If I am interested in learning about people, I’ll read novels rather than psychology.” “I think the Victorian novel tells us more about people than science ever will…and we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” “We learn from literature as we learn from life; no one knows how, but it surely happens. In fact, most of what we know about things that matter comes from such sources, surely not from considered rational inquiry (science), which sometimes reaches unparalleled depths of profundity, but has a rather narrow scope.” “It is almost certain that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called ‘the full human person’ than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do. “[However] I’ve been always resistant consciously to allowing literature to influence my beliefs and attitudes with regard to society and history.” “There are things I resonate to when I read, but I have a feeling that my feelings and attitudes were largely formed prior to reading literature.” “Look, there’s no question that as a child, when I read about China, this influenced my attitudes–-Rickshaw Boy, for example. That had a powerful effect when I read it. It was so long ago I don’t remember a thing about it, except the impact. And I don’t doubt that, for me, personally, like anybody, lots of my perceptions were heightened and attitudes changed by literature over a broad range–Hebrew Literature, Russian literature, and so on. But ultimately, you have to face the world as it is on the basis of other sources of evidence that you can evaluate.” “If I want to understand the nature of China and its revolution, I ought to be cautious about literary renditions.” “Literature can heighten your imagination and insight and understanding, but it surely doesn’t provide the evidence that you need to draw conclusions and substantiate conclusions.” “I can think of things I read that had a powerful effect on me, but whether they changed my attitudes and understanding in any striking or crucial way, I can’t really say.” “People certainly differ, as they should, in what kinds of things make their minds work.” “I don’t really feel that I can draw any tight connections [personally].”

 

–Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, biographies, etc…

 

(1988) “When the MLA put together its centennial issue of PMLA in May 1984, it commissioned Paul Lauter to write about the impact of society on the profession of literary criticism between 1958 and 1983. Lauter was a radical associated with the Movement in the sixties…. According to Lauter, the MLA between the fifties and the eighties had expanded and diversified immensely, yet ‘the hierarchy of the profession remains fundamentally unaltered, so—as yet—does the hierarchy of what we value’…. This conclusion was based on two surveys of hundreds of syllabi collected from around the nation in the eighties. Just as the reigning critical ideology in the late 1950s was ‘formalism,’ so the dominant mode of criticism in the 1980s was ‘formalism,’ however expanded to include hermeneutics, semiotics, and poststructuralism, all of which criticism ‘accepts the formalist stance by analyzing texts, including its own discourse, primarily as autonomous objects isolated from their social origins or functions’…. What most dismayed Lauter about such fashionable criticism were its alignment with linguistics and philosophy rather than history and sociology, its tendency to become obscurant self-referential metacriticism in a debauch of professionalism, its preference for a limited canon of elitist texts, its increasing abnegation of practical exegesis and humanistic values, and its deepening occupation of the core of the profession”…. [Even the rebirth of Marxist criticism in the 1970s deviated from “history and sociology” in that]: “What was odd about the Marxist criticism of this [1970s] Renaissance associated with the post-1950s new left and the Movement was its complete disregard of the old left. Mention was never made of V. F. Calverton, James T. Farrell, Granville Hicks, Bernard Smith, Edmund Wilson, or other Leftist Critics prominent in the thirties. The native tradition of radicalism stemming from the nineteenth century had been forgotten during the heyday of the new left….”

        “In H. Bruce Franklin’s view, what was wrong with academic literary professionals was their thorough immersion in the bourgeois ideology of formalism, which itself was rooted in the counterrevolutionary antiproletarianism of the thirties. ‘In the present era, formalism is the use of aestheticism to blind us to social and moral reality’….”

         “Rather than an instrument or weapon of ruling-class oppression, literature was potentially liberating [in the view of Louis Kampf], provided it was set within a living context close to daily life and removed from its sacrosanct place in the great tradition. ‘In spite of our academic merchants, literature is not a commodity, but the sign of a creative act which expresses personal, social, and historical needs. As such it constantly undermines the status quo.’ The task of the radical critic was to destroy received dogmas and procedures, letting literature be an instrument of agitation and resistance and a force for freedom and genuine liberation. ‘As members of the educated middle class, we must learn that our words should discredit our own culture. Those of us who are literary intellectuals and teachers ought to illustrate in our work that the arts are not alone available to those who are genteel…’.”

 

–Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the 30s to the 80s (Chapter Thirteen: “Leftist Criticism from the 1960s to the 1980s”)

 

 

 

 ________________________________________________________________       

Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

  ________________________________________________________________ 

 

 

 

From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature
(with an emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda)

 

–Toni Cade Bambara, Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.)

 

(1990) “I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror of the lives we are living. Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, ‘Why don’t they?’ And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably to social change. So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.”

 

–Audre Lorde, Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.)

 

(1993) “The 1930s literary radicals, I have demonstrated, brought various considerations to bear in their definitions of proletarian literature. There was, however, no party line on the subject. As Jack Conroy remarked retrospectively about the debates over what proletarian literature was, ‘We used to talk about it endlessly and never arrived at any definite conclusion’…. Even if writers did not feel bound to one or another definition of proletarian literature, [certain] critics argue, they felt obliged to conform to a rigid didacticism involving stock characters, formulaic plots, and a programmatic optimism. Art had to be a weapon and, as such, an instrument of propaganda. But since art and propaganda are antagonistically opposed, left-wing didactic literature was condemned to mouthing slogans and preaching conversion to the cause.

   “In future chapters we will have the opportunity to determine whether proletarian novels were in fact as formulaic and predictable as their detractors charge. What I shall argue in this chapter is that there is very limited validity to the charge that routinely accompanies accusations of political straitjacketing—namely, that Third-Period Marxist critics, as mouthpieces for the party line, sought to impose a specifically propagandistic view of literature upon the writers in the party orbit. I shall show that left-wing literary commentators only rarely promoted the notion that literary works should impart or promote specific tenets of party doctrine; insofar as the critics had a coherent aesthetic theory, this theory was almost exclusively cognitive and reflectionist rather than agitational and hortatory. Indeed, I shall argue that in certain important ways the American approach to questions of representation and ideology was committed—as was the dominant tendency in all Marxist criticism of this period, Soviet and European—to a number of premises about literary form that were bourgeois rather than revolutionary. Literary radicals might applaud proletarian novelists whose works encouraged revolutionary class partisanship. Gold hailed Conroy as ‘a proletarian shock-trooper whose weapon is literature’; the novelist Ruth McKenney wrote Isidor Schneider that his From the Kingdom of Necessity was ‘a more powerful weapon than any tear gas the other side can manufacture.’ In general, however, commentators, critics and novelists alike, held back from theorizing—let alone legislating—any of the representational maneuvers specific to this literary weaponry. Their espoused commitment to the notion that all literature is propaganda for one side or another in the class struggle was countered by a deep antipathy to viewing proletarian literature as propagandistic in any of its distinctive rhetorical strategies. The 1930s radicals never fully repudiated the bourgeois counterposition of art to propaganda: to them, proletarian literature contained very different values and assumptions, but as literature, it was just like any other kind of writing. Ironically, to the extent that they were prescriptive in advocating any given set of aesthetic principles, the Marxist critics urged a largely depoliticized conception of mimetic practice that coexisted only uneasily with many of the values and ideas that they congratulated writers for articulating in their texts” (129-131).

 

–Barbara Foley, “Art or Propaganda,” in Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941

 

(1995) “Ernest Hemingway, thinking of himself, as always, once said that all American literature grew out of Huck Finn. It undoubtedly would have been better for American literature, and American culture, if our literature had grown out of one of the best-selling novels of all time, another American work of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which for its portrayal of an array of thoughtful, autonomous, and passionate black characters leaves Huck Finn far behind… The power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the power of brilliant analysis married to great wisdom of feeling. Stowe never forgets the logical end of any relationship in which one person is the subject and the other is the object. No matter how the two people feel, or what their intentions are, the logic of the relationship is inherently tragic and traps both parties until the false subject/object relationship is ended. Stowe’s most oft-repeated and potent representation of this inexorable logic is the forcible separation of family members, especially of mothers from children…. The grief and despair [the] women display is no doubt what T.S. Eliot was thinking of when he superciliously labeled Uncle Tom’s Cabin ‘sensationalist propaganda,’ but, in fact, few critics in the nineteenth century ever accused Stowe of making up or even exaggerating such stories. One group of former slaves who were asked to comment on Stowe’s depiction of slave life said that she had failed to portray the very worst, and Stowe herself was afraid that if she told some of what she had heard from escaped slaves and other informants during her eighteen years in Cincinnati, the book would be too dark to find any readership at all… One of Stowe’s most skillful techniques is her method of weaving a discussion of slavery into the dialogue of her characters…. Stowe also understands that the real root of slavery is that it is profitable as well as customary…. The very heart of nineteenth-century American experience and literature, the nature and meaning of slavery, is finally what Twain cannot face in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn…. Why, then, we may ask, did Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for all its power and popularity, fail to spawn American literature? Fail, even, to work as a model for how to draw passionate, autonomous and interesting black literary characters? Fail to keep the focus of the American literary imagination on the central dilemma of the American experience: race? …The real loss, though, is not to our literature but to our culture and ourselves, because we have lost the subject of how the various social groups who may not escape to the wilderness are to get along in society; and, in the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the hard-nosed, unsentimental dialogue about race that we should have been having since before the Civil War. Obviously, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is no more the last word on race relations than The Brothers Karamazov or David Copperfield is on any number of characteristically Russian or English themes and social questions…. When Stowe’s voice, a courageously public voice—as demonstrated by the public arguments about slavery that rage throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin—fell silent in our culture and was replaced by the secretive voice of Huck Finn, who acknowledges Jim only when they are alone on the raft together out in the middle of the big river, racism fell out of the public world and into the private one where whites think it really is but blacks know it really isn’t.” “Should Huckleberry Finn be taught in the schools? The critics of the Propaganda Era laid the groundwork for the universal inclusion of the book in school curriculums by declaring it great. Although they predated the current generation of politicized English professors, this was clearly a political act…. I would rather my children read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, even though it is far more vivid in its depiction of cruelty than Huck Finn, and this is because Stowe’s novel is clearly and unmistakably a tragedy. No whitewash, no secrets, but evil, suffering, imagination, endurance, and redemption—just like life. Like little Eva, who eagerly but fearfully listens to the stories of the slaves that her family tries to keep from her, our children want to know what is going on, what has gone on, and what we intend to do about it. If ‘great’ literature has any purpose, it is to help us face up to our responsibilities instead of enabling us to avoid them once again by lighting out for the territory.”

 

–Jane Smiley, “Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain’s ‘Masterpiece,’ Harpers, December 1995

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1996-2003                                                   EXCERPTS CONTENTS

 

 ________________________________________________________________       

Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

  ________________________________________________________________ 

 

From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature
(with a special emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda)

“Fiction has a unique capacity to bring difficult issues to a broad readership on a personal level, creating empathy in a reader’s heart for the theoretical stranger. Its capacity for invoking moral and social responsibility is enormous. Throughout history, every movement toward a more peaceful and humane world has begun with those who imagined the possibilities. The Bellwether Prize seeks to support the imagination of humane possibilities.

        “Defining a literature of social change: Socially responsible literature, for the purposes of this award, may describe categorical human transgressions in a way that compels readers to examine their own prejudices. It may invoke the necessity for economic and social justice for a particular ethnic or social group, or it may explicitly examine movements that have brought positive social change. Or, it may advocate the preservation of nature by describing and defining accountable relationships between people and their environment. The mere description of an injustice, or of the personal predicament of an exploited person, without any clear position of social analysis invoked by the writer, does not in itself constitute socially responsible literature. ‘Social responsibility’ describes a moral obligation of individuals to engage with their communities in ways that promote a more respectful coexistence.

        “Clear, analytical and literary accounts of political and social injustice (either current or historical) include the following excellent examples: Beloved, by Toni Morrison; Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson; To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee; Crows Over a Wheatfield, Paula Sharp; Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison; The Women’s Room, Marilyn French; Memoirs of An Ex-Prom Queen, Alix Kates Shulman; Mean Spirit, Linda Hogan; Cloudsplitter, Russell Banks; The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver; The Color Purple, Alice Walker. Other contemporary contributors to this tradition include Michael Dorris, Louise Erdrich, Ursula Hegi, Ursula K. LeGuin, Ruth Ozeki, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, and John Edgar Wideman.

        “These authors notwithstanding, issues of social responsibility have in recent decades held a less commanding place in U.S. literature than in the wider world. Social commentary in our art is frequently viewed with suspicion. Its advocacy does not fall within the stated goals of any major North American publisher, endowment, or prize for the arts. The Bellwether Prize was conceived to address this deficiency. We would like to see the place of conscience in our nation’s artistic landscape restored to the same high position it holds elsewhere in the world. By means of this prize we hope to enlist North American writers, publishers, and readers to share in this crucial endeavor.”

 

–[Barbara Kingsolver]  Bellwether Prize

 

– NOTE: I view the views by Wood in the several excerpts below to be essentially misguided, though he is referring to novels with a variety of weaknesses. I include the excerpts here however because they are a useful reference to lit establishment views about politics and society in fiction. –

(2001)

“Zadie Smith is merely of her time when she says, in an interview, that it is not the writer’s job ‘to tell us how somebody felt about something, it’s to tell us how the world works.’ She has praised the American writers David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers as ‘guys who know a great deal about the world. They understand macro-microeconomics, the way the internet works, maths, philosophy, but… they’re still people who know something about the street, about family, love, sex, whatever.’ But this idea—that the novelist’s task is to go on to the street and figure out social reality—may well have been altered by the events of September 11, merely through the reminder that whatever the novel gets up to, the ‘culture’ can always get up to something bigger. Ashes defeat garlands. If topicality, relevance, reportage, social comment, preachy presentism, and sidewalk-smarts—in short, the contemporary American novel in its current, triumphalist form—are novelists’ chosen sport, then they will sooner or later be outrun by their own streaking material. Fiction may well be, as Stendhal wrote, a mirror carried down the middle of a road; but the Stendhalian mirror would explode with reflections were it now being walked around Manhattan. For who would dare to be knowledgeable about politics and society now? Is it possible to imagine Don DeLillo today writing his novel Mao II—a novel that proposed the foolish notion that the terrorist now does what the novelist used to do, that is, ‘alter the inner life of the culture’? Surely, for a while, novelists will be leery of setting themselves up as analysts of society, while society bucks and charges so helplessly. Surely they will tread carefully over their generalisations. It is now very easy to look very dated very fast.”

–James Wood, “Tell Me How Does It Feel?” The Guardian, October 6, 2001

(2001) “If anyone still had a longing for the great American ‘social novel,’ the events of September 11 may have corrected it…a passage at the conclusion of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, about the end of the American century, now seems laughably archival: ‘It seemed to Enid that current events in general were more muted or insipid nowadays than they’d been in her youth. She had memories of the 1930s, she’d seen firsthand what could happen to a country when the world economy took its gloves off…. But disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States. Safety features had been put in place, like the squares of rubber that every modern playground was paved with, to soften impacts.’ Despite the falter of this passage, Franzen would probably agree that the novel should not go chasing after the bait of social information. Five years ago he published an essay in Harper’s in which he declared that the social novel is no longer possible. The piece was so punctually intelligent and affecting—it had the charm and the directness typical of his work—and it was above all so long, that few noticed its incoherence. Franzen began by admitting to a recent depression, a dejection about the American novel, a ‘despair about the possibility of connecting the personal and the social.’ No challenging novel since Catch-22 had truly affected the culture, he complained. As a young writer he had believed that ‘putting a novel’s characters in a dynamic social setting enriched the story that was being told.’ The novel, he used to think, should bring ‘social news, social instruction.’ It should ‘Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream.’ It had ‘a responsibility to dramatize important issues of the day.’ Franzen’s first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, was such a book; but it came and went pretty quietly, and Franzen was left pondering ‘the failure of my culturally engaged novel to engage with the culture. I’d intended to provoke; what I got instead was sixty reviews in a vacuum.’ To be sure, there was a book tour, a photo spread in Vogue, and a large advance (which is more than most serious writers are vouchsafed): all this was merely ‘the consolation of no longer mattering to the culture.’ Franzen’s second novel also dribbled into the celebrity-sand; there were good reviews, ‘decent sales, and the deafening silence of irrelevance.’ So the social novel, it seemed, had no utility. The novel had lost its cultural centrality, its cultural power; modern technologies, such as television, ‘do a better job of social instruction.’ And how to create something permanent whose subject—modern culture—is ephemeral? Franzen rightly asked the question, perhaps the most tormenting one for contemporary novelists, of how to write a novel both of its time and properly resistant to its time: ‘how can you achieve topical “relevance” without drawing on an up-to-the-minute vocabulary of icons and attitudes and thereby, far from challenging the hegemony of overnight obsolescence, confirming and furthering it?’ By the end of his essay, Franzen had decided that there was ‘something wrong with the whole model of the novel of social engagement,’ and had admitted to a ‘conviction that bringing “meaningful news” is no longer so much a defining function of the novel as an accidental product.’ The solution, it seemed, was aesthetic. ‘Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn’t this enough? Isn’t it a lot?’ It certainly is.”

–James Wood, “Abhorring a Vacuum,” The New Republic, October 18, 2001 [retitled in part as an essay on the “Social Novel” in The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, 2004]

(2002) “In his memoir The Noise of Time, Mandelstam recalls a haughty friend who used to say, disdainfully, that ‘some men are books, others—newspapers.’ The remark might be adapted. Some books are books, others—newspapers. In recent years, the large American novel has frequently aspired to the condition of journalism. The great quarry of the last decade, and sometimes the great cemetery, has been the social novel, the vast report on the way we live now, the stuffed dossier, the thriving broadsheet streaming with contemporary brightnesses. Tom Wolfe’s barely literate plea for more of just this kind of fiction has always seemed nonsensical in the age of Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and most recently Jonathan Franzen. We have too much socially and politically obsessed fiction, not too little. Mimesis deserves a holiday. The bright book of life need not include all of life.”

 

–James Wood, “Unions,” The New Republic, October 10, 2002

 

(2003) “I suggest that the role of the artist is to transcend conventional wisdom, to transcend the word of the establishment, to transcend the orthodoxy, to go beyond and escape what is handed down by the government or what is said in the media…. It is the job of the artist to think outside the boundaries of permissible thought and dare to say things that no one else will say…. It is absolutely patriotic to point a finger at the government to say that it is not doing what it should be doing to safeguard the right of citizens to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…. We must be able to look at ourselves, to look at our country honestly and clearly. And just as we can examine the awful things that people do elsewhere, we have to be willing to examine the awful things that are done here by our government.”

–Howard Zinn, Artists in Times of War 

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Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

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From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature
(with a special emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda)

 

(1864) To work for the people, – that is the great and urgent necessity.

The human mind – an important thing to say at this minute – has a greater need of the ideal even than of the real.

It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live. Now, do you wish to realize the difference? Animals exist, man lives.

To live, is to understand. To live, is to smile at the present, to look toward posterity over the wall. To live, is to have in one’s self a balance, and to weigh in it the good and evil. To live, is to have justice, truth, reason, devotion, probity, sincerity, common-sense, right, and duty nailed to the heart. To live, is to know what one is worth, what one can do and should do. Life is conscience. Cato would not rise before Ptolemy. Cato lived.

Literature is the secretion of civilization, poetry of the ideal. That is why literature is one of the wants of societies. That is why poetry is a hunger of the soul. That is why poets are the first instructors of the people…(257).

We have just said, “Literature is the secretion of civilization.” Do you doubt it? Open the first statistics you come across.

Here is one which we find under our hand: Bagne de Toulon, 1862. Three thousand and ten prisoners. Of these three thousand and ten convicts, forty know a little more than to read and write, two hundred and eighty-seven know how to read and write, nine hundred and four read badly and write badly, seventeen hundred and seventy-nine know neither how to read nor write…(258).

The transformation of the crowd into the people, – profound labour! It is to this labour that the men called socialists have devoted themselves during the last forty years. The author of this book, however insignificant he may be, is one of the oldest in the labour; “Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné” dates from 1828, and “Claude Gueux” from 1834. He claims his place among these philosophers because it is a place of persecution. A certain hatred of socialism, very blind, but very general, has been at work most bitterly among the influential classes. (Classes, then, are still in existence?) Let it not be forgotten, socialism, true socialism, has for its end the elevation of the masses to the civic dignity, and therefore its principal care is for moral and intellectual cultivation. The first hunger is ignorance; socialism wishes then, above all, to instruct. That does not hinder socialism from being calumniated, and socialists from being denounced. To most of the infuriated, trembling cowards who have their say at the present moment, these reformers are public enemies. They are guilty of everything that has gone wrong…(259).

The democratic idea, the new bridge of civilization, undergoes at this moment the formidable trial of overweight. Every other idea would certainly give way under the load that it is made to bear. Democracy proves its solidity by the absurdities that are heaped on, without shaking it. It must resist everything that people choose to place on it. At this moment they try to make it carry despotism…(260).

That history has to be re-made is evident. Up to the present time, it has been nearly always written from the miserable point of view of accomplished fact; it is time to write from the point of view of principle, – and that, under penalty of nullity…(347).

– Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare

 

(1883) “You may well think I am not here to criticize any special school of art or artists, or to plead for any special style, or to give you any instructions, however general, as to the practice of the arts. Rather I want to take counsel with you as to what hindrances may lie in the way towards making art what it should be, a help and solace to the daily life of all men…. Since I am a member of a Socialist propaganda I earnestly beg those of you who agree with me to help us actively, with your time and your talents if you can, but if not, at least with your money, as you can…. Help us now, you whom the fortune of your birth has helped to make wise and refined; and as you help us in our work-a-day business toward the success of the cause, instill into us your superior wisdom, your superior refinement, and you in your turn may be helped by the courage and hope of those who are not so completely wise and refined. Remember we have but one weapon against that terrible organization of selfishness which we attack, and that weapon is Union” (108-127). 

 

–William Morris, On Art and Socialism

 

 

(1885) “It is always bad for an author to be infatuated with his hero, and it seems to me that in this case [Minna Kautsky’s novel Old and New] you have given way somewhat to this weakness… I am not at all an opponent of tendentious poetry as such. The father of tragedy, Aeschylus, and the father of comedy, Aristophanes, were both decidedly tendentious poets, just as were Dante and Cervantes; and the main merit of Schiller’s Craft and Loves is that it is the first German political propaganda drama. The modern Russians and Norwegians, who are writing splendid novels, are all tendentious. But I think that the bias [thesis] should flow by itself from the situation and action, without particular indications [explicit display], and that the writer is not obliged to obtrude on the reader the future historical solutions of the social conflicts pictured. And especially in our conditions the novel appeals mostly to readers of bourgeois circles, that is, not directly related to us, and therefore a socialist-biased novel fully achieves its purpose, in my view, if by conscientiously describing the real mutual relations, breaking down conventional illusions about them, it shatters the optimism of the bourgeois world, although the author does not offer any definite solutions or does not even line up openly on any particular side…. And in Stefan you showed that you are able to view your heroes with that fine irony which demonstrates the power of the writer over his creation.”

 

–Frederick Engels, Letter to Minna Kautsky (1885), in Literature and Art [Marx and Engels], 1947 (also excerpted and translated somewhat differently by George Steiner in “Marxism and the Literary Critic,” 1958, in Language and Silence, 1967)

 

 

(1888) “I am far from finding fault with you for not having written a point-blank socialist novel, a ‘Tendenzroman’ as we Germans call it, to glorify the social and political views of the author. That is not at all what I mean. The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art.”

 

–Frederick Engels, Letter to Margaret Harkness (excerpted by George Steiner in “Marxism and the Literary Critic,” 1958, in Language and Silence, 1967)

 

 

(1898) “This investigation has brought me to the conviction that almost all that our society considers to be art, good art, and the whole of art, far from being real and good art and the whole of art, is not even art at all but only a counterfeit of it…. In our society the difficulty of recognizing real works of art is further increased by the fact that the external quality of the work in false productions is not only no worse, but often better, than in real ones; the counterfeit is often more effective than the real, and its subject more interesting… There is one indubitable sign distinguishing real art from its counterfeit—namely, the infectiousness of art…”

 

–Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?

 

 

(1903) “ ‘The novel must not preach,’ you hear them say. As though it were possible to write a novel without a purpose, even if it is only the purpose to amuse. One is willing to admit that this savors a little of quibbling, for ‘purpose’ and purpose to amuse are two different purposes. But every novel, even the most frivolous, must have some reason for the writing of it, and in that sense must have a ‘purpose’. Every novel must do one of three things—it must tell something, (2) show something, or (3) prove something. Some novels do all three of these; some do only two; all must do at least one…. The third, and what we hold to be the best class, proves something, draws conclusions from a whole congeries of forces, social tendencies, race impulses, devotes itself not to a study of men but of man. In this class falls the novel with the purpose, such as ‘Les Miserables’. And the reason we decide upon this last as the highest form of the novel is because that, though setting a great purpose before it as its task, it nevertheless includes, and is forced to include, both the other classes…. [The novel] may be a great force, that works together with the pulpit and the universities for the good of the people, fearlessly proving that power is abused, that the strong grind the faces of the weak, that an evil tree is still growing in the midst of the garden, that undoing follows hard upon unrighteousness, that the course of Empire is not yet finished, and that the races of men have yet to work out their destiny in those great and terrible movements that crush and grind and rend asunder the pillars of the houses of the nations” (203-207).

 

–Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist

 

(1905) “Literature must become Party literature…. Down with un-partisan littérateurs! Down with the supermen of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat, ‘a small cog and a small screw’ in the social-democratic mechanism, one and indivisible—a mechanism set in motion by the entire conscious vanguard of the whole working class. Literature must become an integral part of the organized, methodical, and unified labours of the social-democratic Party.”

–Vladimir Lenin, “Party Organization and Party Literature,” in Novaia Jizn

 

(1924) The book purposes to investigate the whole process of art creation, and to place the art function in relation to the sanity, health and progress of mankind. It will attempt to set up new canons in the arts, overturning many of the standards now accepted. A large part of the world’s art treasures will be taken out to the scrap-heap, and a still larger part transferred from the literature shelves to the history shelves of the world’s library.

Since childhood the writer has lived most of his life in the world’s art. For thirty years he has been studying it consciously, and for twenty-five years he has been shaping in his mind the opinions here recorded; testing and revising them by the art-works which he has produced, and by the stream of other men’s work which has flowed through his mind. His decisions are those of a working artist, one who has been willing to experiment and blunder for himself, but who has also made it his business to know and judge the world’s best achievements.

The conclusion to which he has come is that mankind is today under the spell of utterly false conceptions of what art is and should be; of utterly vicious and perverted standards of beauty and dignity. We list six great art lies now prevailing in the world, which this book will discuss:

Lie Number One: the Art for Art’s Sake lie; the notion that the end of art is in the art work, and that the artist’s sole task is perfection of form. It will be demonstrated that this lie is a defensive mechanism of artists run to seed, and that its prevalence means degeneracy, not merely in art, but in the society where such art appears.

Lie Number Two: the lie of Art Snobbery; the notion that art is something esoteric, for the few, outside the grasp of the masses. It will be demonstrated that with few exceptions of a special nature, great art has always been popular art, and great artists have swayed the people.

Lie Number Three: the lie of Art Tradition; the notion that new artists must follow old models, and learn from the classics how to work. It will be demonstrated that vital artists make their own technique; and that present-day technique is far and away superior to the technique of any art period preceding.

Lie Number Four: the lie of Art Dilettantism; the notion that the purpose of art is entertainment and diversion, an escape from reality. It will be demonstrated that this lie is a product of mental inferiority, and that the true purpose of art is to alter reality.

Lie Number Five: the lie of the Art Pervert; the notion that art has nothing to do with moral questions. It will be demonstrated that all art deals with moral questions; since there are no other questions.

Lie Number Six: the lie of Vested Interest; the notion that art excludes propaganda and has nothing to do with freedom and justice. Meeting that issue without equivocation, we assert:

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

As commentary on the above, we add, that when artists or art critics make the assertion that art excludes propaganda, what they are saying is that their kind of propaganda is art, and other kinds of propaganda are not art.

–Upton Sinclair, Mammonart: An Essay on Economic Interpretation 

 

(1926) “…all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”

Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

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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

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

2004       Dale Peck                                     Hatchet Jobs: Cutting Through Contemporary Literature

BIBLIOGRAPY CONTENTS

 

________________________________________________________________       

Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

________________________________________________________________ 

 

See also:

by  Tony Christini

 

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

 

________________________________________________________________

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

 

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”…]

From HNN: 

Peter La Chapelle, Assistant Professor in the History Program at Nevada State College and author of Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California, analyzes the historical connections between country music and left-wing and right-wing politics:

Perhaps the national amnesia about country’s liberal, populist, and leftwing roots will fade as artists as varied in politics and style as Merle Haggard, Iris DeMent, Willie Nelson, the Old Crow Medicine Show, Butch Hancock, I See Hawks in L.A., Bobby Braddock, Tom Snider, Nanci Griffith, Steve Earle, and Allison Moorer sing out against the Iraq War, or other more mainstream artists such as Tim McGraw and Tracy Lawrence bemoan its consequences. 

KEYWORD LISTS, AND OTHERS

The general bibliographic list is broken into several other groupings, including lists of: “propaganda” titles; “social change” titles, “politic”… titles, assorted anthologies of literary criticism; assorted interview collections; encyclopedias and other reference volumes; and key works on propaganda (public relations) and the public. See other links for excerpts. See here for more information about the bibliograpies and excerpts.

___________________

See also:

by  Tony Christini

__________________________________________________________________________

“PROPAGANDA” TITLES

 

1972       Norman Philbrick, Ed.              Trumpets Sounding: Propaganda Plays Of The American Revolution

1975       Ian Boyd                                     The Novels Of G.K. Chesterton: A Study In Art And Propaganda

1978       David Smith                               Socialist Propaganda In The Twentieth-Century Novel

1978       George H. Szanto                     Theater And Propaganda

1979       Johnson and Johnson              Propaganda And Aesthetics: The Literary Politics Of African-American Magazines…

1983       A. P. Foulkes                              Literature And Propaganda

1983       Nicholas Pronay, Ed.                Propaganda, Politics And Film, 1918-45

1989       Peter Buitenhuis                      The Great War Of Words: British, American, And Canadian Propaganda And Fiction,
1914-1933

1992       Jane DeRose Evans                  The Art Of Persuasion: Political Propaganda From Aeneas To Brutus

1995       David Bell                                   Ardent Propaganda: Miners’ Novels And Class Conflict 1929-1939

1995       Judith K. Proud                          Children And Propaganda: Fiction And Fairy Tale In Vichy France

1997       Toby Clark                                  Art And Propaganda In The Twentieth Century: The Political Image…

1997       Friedl, Bettina. Ed                     On To Victory: Propaganda Plays Of The Woman Suffrage Movement

1998       Robert Cole, Ed.                        International Encyclopedia Of Propaganda

1998       Mary Whitby                               Propaganda Of Power: The Role Of Panegyric In Late Antiquity

2002       Louis Pizzitola                            Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, And Propaganda In The Movies

Continue reading LITERARY CRITICISM, PROPAGANDA, AND SOCIAL CHANGE

 

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.

________________________________

1858       Hippolyte Taine                          Balzac: A Critical Study

________________________________

~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

________________________________

1875       Leslie Stephen                            Hours in a Library

________________________________

1883      William Morris                              On Art And Socialism [essays, 1877-1896; collected 1999] [“Art under Plutocracy”…]

________________________________

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] Continue reading LITERARY CRITICISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE – BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Below are the bibliography contents and the beginning of the listing 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 extending in its entirety from the 1800s to today. A few texts on novel form and technique are also included. The list here covers the time period up 1929. Preceding that list are select works from the full list. See links for excerpts. See here for more information about the bibliography and excerpts. See “Bibliographies, Particular” for a breakdown of the general bibliography into listings organized by title and genre.
__________________________________________________________________

BIBLIOGRAPHY CONTENTS
   1800s to 1929 (this page)
   1930-1959
   1960-1989
   1990-2003 
   1800s-2003 (entire)
__________________________________________________________________

POLITICAL, SOCIAL, CULTURAL CRITICISM ON IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE: 1800s-1929

1875        Leslie Stephen                               Hours in a Library

    1883      William Morris     On Art And Socialism [essays, 1877-1896; collected 1999] [“Art under Plutocracy”…]

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]

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”…]

 

1930-1959

 

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.

 

________________________________________________________________       

Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

________________________________________________________________ 

 

 

EXCERPTS: 1800s-2003 

From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature
(with an emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda)

 

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.

___________________________________________________________________

PDF OF GREATLY EXPANDED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND EXCERPTS

___________________________________________________________________

1864 – Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare
1883 –William Morris, On Art and Socialism
1885, 1888 –Frederick Engels, Letters
1898 –Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?
1903 –Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist 
1905 –Vladimir Lenin, “Party Organization and Party Literature,” in Novaia Jizn
1924 –Upton Sinclair, Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation
1926 –W.E.B. DuBois, African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000
               __________________________________________________________

1928 –Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda
1931 –Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle
1932 –V. F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature
1934 –John Dewey, Art as Experience
               __________________________________________________________

  Sequence of relatively recent literary commercial essays on the social novel:

  1961 – Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction,” Commentary, March, 1961 (also in Reading
              Myself and Others, 1985)
  1989 – Tom Wolfe, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” Harpers, 1989
  1995 – Jane Smiley, “Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain’s ‘Masterpiece’,” 
              Harpers, December 1995
  1996 – Jonathan Franzen, “Perchance to Dream,” Harpers, 1996 [Revised, retitled as “Why
              Bother?” in How to Be Alone, 2002]
  2001 – James Wood, “Human, All Too Inhuman,” The New Republic, August 30, 2001;
              “Abhorring a Vacuum,” The New Republic, October 18, 2001

 

________________________________________________________________       

Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

________________________________________________________________ 

 

EXPLORATIONS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIETY AND IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE (FICTION, POETRY, DRAMA, CREATIVE NON-FICTION – ALSO FILM, MUSIC, CARTOONS, AND ART IN GENERAL).

BIBLIOGRAPHY – 1800s TO TODAY
A listing 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.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES – PARTICULAR
The general bibliographic list broken into several groupings, including lists of: “propaganda” titles; “social change” titles; “politic”… titles; assorted anthologies of literary criticism; assorted interview collections;  encyclopedias and other reference volumes; and key works on propaganda (public relations) and the public.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS
From works on political, social, and cultural criticism of imaginative literature, with an emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda.

 

ABOUT THE BIBLIOGRAPHIES AND EXCERPTS

These partial bibliographies explore imaginative literature and literary criticism and social change, and in particular how the former two can contribute to the latter. These lists and excerpts are designed for, among others, activists and scholars, students and teachers, and readers and writers of literature who work for social change.

The lists of works on society and imaginative literature are rough and ready. I did not undertake a comprehensive search for criticism on imaginative literature and its social relationship, because I don’t know how to do it and I don’t think it’s possible – there is a tremendous amount of information available from a wide variety of sources.

 

________________________________________________________________       

Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

________________________________________________________________ 

 

 

 

 

 

Though certain types of novels such as “psychological” novels and bildungsromans may most commonly focus on private rather than social or public realms of life, to some extent every novel is a social–or political–novel. Novels that are intensively focused on social forces and public domains appear in many types and are known by many names. It is impossible to classify absolutely any particular novel as a single type, since virtually all novels and works of literature contain a variety of categorical features; nevertheless, classifications and descriptions are useful for thinking about particular works, even if precise definitions of many classifications are not universally or even widely agreed upon.

[Also, see some conventional defintions, below list.]

political novel
governmental novel

tendentious novel

tendenzroman

roman à these
thesis novel

didactic novel

ideological novel

novel with a purpose

authoritarian novel

committed novel

novel of engagement

littérature engagée

engagé novel

proletarian novel

Marxist novel

materialist novel
radical novel
allegorical novel

revolutionary novel

anti-war novel

futuristic novel

speculative novel

utopian novel

dystopian novel

culturally critical novel

problem novel

propaganda novel

realistic novel

naturalistic novel

picaresque

novel of ideas
protest novel

historical novel

socialist novel

anarchist novel

social protest novel
social mystery/crime novel

social satire

social morality novel

social philosophy novel
etc…

 

from A Handbook to Literature, Eighth Edition, Harmon and Holman, Eds., 2000:

 

PROPAGANDA: Material propagated for the purpose of advocating a political or ideological position; also the mechanism for such propaganda. Earlier, in European use, propaganda carried a positive or neutral sense of “distributing information” or “advertising”; since about 1930, however, the connotations have become increasingly negative. [If the PROPAGANDA link fails, click here, then click “Public relations bookshelf.”]

 

PROPAGANDA NOVEL: A novel dealing with a special social, political, economic, or moral issue or problem and possibly advocating a doctrinaire solution. If the propagandistic purpose dominates the work so as to dwarf or eclipse all other elements, such as plot and character, then the novel belongs to the realm of the didactic and probably cannot be understood or appreciated for its own sake as a work of art. It may be good propaganda and bad literature at the same time. William Godwin’s Things as They Are: or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) is an early example. See PROBLEM NOVEL. 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________       

 

Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

________________________________________________________________ 

 

 

 

[also see additional critical excerpts and related posts]

(1883) You may well think I am not here to criticize any special school of art or artists, or to plead for any special style, or to give you any instructions, however general, as to the practice of the arts. Rather I want to take counsel with you as to what hindrances may lie in the way towards making art what it should be, a help and solace to the daily life of all men…. Since I am a member of a Socialist propaganda I earnestly beg those of you who agree with me to help us actively, with your time and your talents if you can, but if not, at least with your money, as you can….

– William Morris, On Art and Socialism

 

(1903) [The novel] may be a great force, that works together with the pulpit and the universities for the good of the people, fearlessly proving that power is abused, that the strong grind the faces of the weak, that an evil tree is still growing in the midst of the garden, that undoing follows hard upon unrighteousness, that the course of Empire is not yet finished, and that the races of men have yet to work out their destiny in those great and terrible movements that crush and grind and rend asunder the pillars of the houses of the nations.

– Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist

(1926) …all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.

– W.E.B. DuBois, African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 (Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ed.)

(1932) As a group [revolutionary writers] are convinced that present-day industrial society is based upon exploitation and injustice; that it creates distress and misery for the many and brings happiness only to the few; that its dedication to the ideal of profit instead of use is destructive of everything fine and inspiring in life; and that until its private-property basis is destroyed and replaced by the social control of all property, the human race will never be able to escape the horrors of unemployment, poverty, and war. More than that, [these writers] believe that their literature can serve a greater purpose only when it contributes, first, toward the destruction of present-day society, and, second, toward the creation of a new society which will embody…a social, instead of an individualistic ideal. Unlike Ibsen, they do not ask questions and then refuse to answer them. Unlike the iconoclasts, they are not content to tear down the idols and stop there. Their aim is to answer questions as well as ask them, and to provide a new order to replace an old one. Their attitude, therefore, is a positive instead of a negative one.

– V.F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature

(1936) I think that literature must be viewed both as a branch of the fine arts and as an instrument of social influence. It is this duality, intrinsic to literature, that produces unresolved problems of literary criticism…. I suggest that in the field of literature the formula “All art is propaganda” be replaced by another: “Literature is an instrument of social influence”…. [Literature] can be propaganda—in the more limited sense of my definition of propaganda; and it can sometimes perform an objective social function that approaches agitation. However, it often performs neither of these functions and yet does perform an objective social function…

(1941) Art cannot safely confine itself to merely using the values which arise out of a given social texture and integrating their conflicts, as the soundest, “purest” art will do. It must have a definite hortatory function, an educational element of suasion or inducement; it must be partially forensic. Such a quality we consider to be the essential work of propaganda.

– Kenneth Burke, “The Nature of Art Under Capitalism,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form

(1964) “In the last analysis, what we ask of the social novelist is not so much that he should reflect our view of society, but that he should make us see society his way” and that such novelists “look beyond [the national experience] to the universal human experience of which it is inevitably a part…. In admiring the novels of George Eliot, we need to remember that what seems to us the accuracy of her social observation is in some degree an indication of her greatness as a novelist, of her power to make us accept the image of society she presents.”

– Michael Millgate, American Social Fiction

(1978) The successful critic of society, it may be suggested, is the writer who learns the wisdom of indirection. He is the writer who learns to combine instruction with delight, without in any way compromising his integrity of blunting the force of his social criticism. Some literary forms are especially suited to methods of indirect attack: satire, for example. From the time of the Greeks onwards, satirists have invented a variety of ways to maintain apparent detachment and the indirect approach, while pressing home their attack. The three commonest forms are the beast fable, the imaginary journey, and the Utopian fantasy. The beast fable has been used by the Greek dramatist Aristophanes in the Frogs, by Chaucer in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and by George Orwell in Animal Farm. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels provides a model for the imaginary journey, while the history of literary utopias stretches – to take it no further – from More’s sixteenth-century Utopia, to Butler’s Erewhon (1872), Morris’s News From Nowhere (1891), and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). It is essential for the satirist’s purpose to shock us into seeing our own familiar world through unfamiliar eyes; some radical change of perspective is therefore absolutely necessary. Each of the three devices, the beast fable, the imaginary journey, and Utopian fantasy achieves this end.

– John Colmer, “The Writer as Critic of Society,” Coleridge to Catch-22: Images of Society

(1990) I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror of the lives we are living. Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, ‘Why don’t they?’ And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably to social change. So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.

– Audre Lorde, Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.)

 

A few thoughts on “Bluebird” – a short story by Karl Wenclas. The story is thoughtful and lively – repeatedly incisive, piercingly so at points, not least the Teen Pop Beat Magazine interview.

Unfortunately the story has a weak ending that is led up to by threads of weakness throughout. By the end of the story, the counterpoint character Alex Starski and her normative story are realized as little more than, not strikingly distinct from, that of the protagonist Melissa “Bluebird.” What is the music scene really like that Alex hopes to go back to? It’s never detailed, let alone clearly and powerfully counterpointed to Melissa Bluebird’s hollow narcissistic corporate scene. How can it be counterpointed when it’s not detailed? It’s not detailed directly and even very little by implication.

Continue reading Let It Fly

In a recent Q&A, John Updike says of a novel by Ngugi wa Thiong’o:

“I find it a hard book to believe, it’s overtly political, which pains me. I was told by my daughter in-law, who is a Kenyan, that Ngugi liked it – he’s trying to fictionalize the dire conditions of African politics and African leadership, which I thought was terribly broad. You also have to consider there’s a virtue to a book that you are blind to or numb to get though…”

Willfully “blind”?

Purposefully “numb”?

This comment by Updike helps reveal the bankrupt nature of about half of his “rules” for reviewing, the negligent nature of the framing emphasis of his “rules”.

Continue reading John Updike and the Overtly Political