The American political novel:Critical essays.

The political novel, with its creative balancing of ideas with art, has always been one of the more fascinating forms of fiction, and has acquired an even wider appeal recently. With a phenomenal expansion in its range of meanings, the word "politics" has now come to mean not only the art of government or 'statecraft' but the idea of dominance and power-equations in almost every sphere of human activity, and has thus become an all-pervasive concept.
his collection of fifteen critical essays on The American Political Novel opens with three general discussions of the definition, the nature, and the scope of the political novel in America. These overviews are followed by detailed textual analyses of a wide range of individual political novels and novelists from the last one hundred years. The novelists discussed include acknowledged classics of American fiction such as Henry James, Jack London, Nathanael West, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck; the early feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman; three black novelists, George Schuyler, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison; and some of the most exciting and important contemporary novelists: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and E.L. Doctorow.