Political Fiction and the American Self

Examining political novels that have achieved (or been denied) canonicalstatus, John Whalen-Bridge demonstrates how Herman Melville, Jack London,Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood havegrappled with the problem of balancing radicalism and art. He shows thatsome books are more political than others, that some political novelistsare more skillful than others, and that readers must allow for basic workingdistinctions between politics and aesthetics if we are to make usefuljudgments about which political novels to read, and why."Whalen-Bridge demonstrates with clarity and power that the Americanpolitical novel should not be ostracized but celebrated as a genre equalor superior to poetic and aesthetic ones." -- Tobin Siebers, authorof Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism