The novel of ideas is an important form that is both under-theorised and largely neglected in accounts of the development of the novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book sets out the history of this critical hostility, which took hold as the aesthetic protocols of literary modernism became established among key literary tastemakers in Britain. It then proposes a revaluation and a critical reclamation of the novel of ideas, showcasing a range of perceptive, sympathetic, and sensitive ways of reading novels in which discursive argumentation is foregrounded and where the clash of ideas is vital to the novelistic effect. Through thematic chapters as well as new accounts of key novelists in the British tradition-including George Eliot, H. G. Wells, Doris Lessing and Kamila Shamsie-this book repositions the novel of ideas as a major form in modern British literature.
Part I. 1850–1900: Philosophy, Religion and the Victorian Novel of Ideas: 1. Moral ideation in the nineteenth-century British novel: rethinking character-character dialogue Amanda Anderson; 2. George Eliot: realism and dialectics Ruth Abbott; 3. Samuel Butler: ideas against themselves John Kucich; 4. George Gissing: idealism and social reform Benjamin Kohlmann; Part II. 1900–1945: The Novel of Ideas, Revolution and Reform: 5. The British novel of ideas in an international context Rachel Potter; 6. H. G. Wells: exposition and dialogue Suzanne Hobson; 7. G. K. Chesterton: tradition and ideals Christos Hadjiyannis; 8. E. M. Forster: liberal propositions and liberal proceduralism Janice Ho; 9. Aldous Huxley: mysticism and science Jake Poller; 10. Katharine Burdekin: self and not self Glyn Salton-Cox; 11. Mulk Raj Anand: anticolonialism and abjection Anindya Raychaudhuri; 12. Storm Jameson: fascism and liberalism Katherine Cooper; Part III. 1945–1975: the Novel of Ideas and the Cold War: 13. The psycho-political novel of ideas and the Second World War Adam Piette; 14. Naomi Mitchison: Nation and history James Purdon; 15. George Orwell: politics and power Nathan Waddell; 16. Rebecca West: trials and retribution Allan Hepburn; 17. George Lamming: colonialism and rumination Douglas Mao; 18. Doris Lessing: espionage and speculative fiction Peter Kalliney; 19. Iris Murdoch: Philosophy and the Novel David Dwan; Part IV. 1975–present: The Contemporary Novel of Ideas; 20. Comedy, sincerity and hypocrisy in the novel of ideas Matthew Taunton; 21. Malcolm Bradbury: sociology and satire Nicoletta Pireddu; 22. Hanif Kureishi: fundamentalism and multiculturalism Michael Perfect; 23. Ian McEwan: ideation and realism Dominic Head; 24. Kamila Shamsie: citizenship and civil rights Birgit Breidenbach; 25. Zadie Smith: Art and Beauty Peter Boxall.
Rachel Potter is a Professor of Modern Literature at the University of East Anglia, specialising in twentieth century literature and culture. Her books include Obscene Modernism: Literary censorship and experiment, 1900-1940 (2013), The Edinburgh Guide to Modernist Literature (2012), Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture, 1900-1930 (2006) and the co-edited Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature and Politics (2023). Matthew Taunton is an associate professor in literature at the University of East Anglia, specialising in modern and contemporary writing. He is the author of Red Britain: the Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture (2019) and Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris (2009) and co-editor (with Benjamin Kohlmann) A History of 1930s British Literature (2019).
