The Political Novel: Re-Imagining the 20th Century - Hardcover

"This is a wonderful read. Indeed once I started the book I could not put it down. It is wonderful to see a sophisticated argument about the nature of modern politics played out through close readings of fiction... This book will bring students of politics to literature and students of literature to politics. It is a cross disciplinary gem." - Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College, USA, and Editor of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society "This book addresses the many European and American writers whose novels document the horrific consequences of politics "gone bad" in the twentieth century.. His book adds up to a powerful challenge on big political questions that empirical political scientists and many other types of scholars routinely evade." Michael McCann, Associate Professor of Law, Vermont Law School, and Distinguished Visiting Hall of Fame Professor of Law at Mississippi College School of Law, USA."

This title reveals how novels of political estrangement have drawn on cultural narratives to capture the zeitgeist of the 20th Century and the disillusionment of modernism. Scholars from a variety of academic disciplines have been drawn into exhaustive analyses of what went wrong in 'the terrible 20th Century', as Winston Churchill dubbed it. In this book, Scheingold adds political novels to those inquiries and argues that they make a distinctive and hitherto neglected contribution to the collective memory of the 20th Century. These fictional accounts are the work of some of the century's most celebrated novelists: Kafka, Heller, Boll, Grass, Vonnegut and others. As refracted through the literary imagination, the 'terrible' 20th Century takes on new meaning - meaning that tends to elude historians and social scientists. Novelists peer into the shattered lives, the moral dilemmas, and the emotional chaos of the century - thus viewing a collective catastrophe through the everyday lives of victims, victimizers, temporizers, opportunists, true believers, and those who simply averted their eyes. In so doing, these novelists reveal, sometimes prophetically, the etiology of catastrophe, and both deepen our memory of the past and help us think more clearly about the future.