Political Fiction and the American Self

Examining political novels that have achieved (or been denied) canonical

        status, John Whalen-Bridge demonstrates how Herman Melville, Jack London,

        Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood have

        grappled with the problem of balancing radicalism and art. He shows that

        some books are more political than others, that some political novelists

        are more skillful than others, and that readers must allow for basic working

        distinctions between politics and aesthetics if we are to make useful

        judgments about which political novels to read, and why.

      "Whalen-Bridge demonstrates with clarity and power that the American

        political novel should not be ostracized but celebrated as a genre equal

        or superior to poetic and aesthetic ones." -- Tobin Siebers, author

        of Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism