Title: Politics and the Novel
Subtitle: Contemporary Faces of Totalitarianism
Subject Classification:  Literature and Literary Criticism, Politics and Government, Society and Culture  
BIC Classification: DSBH, JP, JF
BISAC Classification:
Binding: Hardback, eBook
Planned publication date: Dec 2026
ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-83711-865-6
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-83711-866-3

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Description

This book is a study of the philosophy of power underwriting canonical novels of the postwar period, before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. An interesting phenomenon is the homogeneity of vision and fictional world-building in authors originating in all parts of the world. They usually choose the dystopic mode of representing the deconstruction of the subject in history; unknown agency coupled with the individual’s deindividuation and the waning of self-consciousness in a process of social objectification.

Versions of totalitarianism, political or technological, haunted the latter half of the twentieth century, while modern means of digital control have turned a concept into a palpable reality. The individual lives with a sense of being permanently under surveillance. Globalization generated a common understanding of the motives, modes and practices of oppressive political agencies. The exercise of totalitarian control is revealed to be following the same pattern, of impoverished imagination, whether diachronically (revived despotic rules in the nation’s past) or spatially (for instance, the repressive policing in Ogawa’s The Memory Police is identical with that exerted in the communist block after World War II as recorded in diaries of victims and witnesses). A pattern recognition test will reveal surprising uniformity in the workings of the totalitarian mind.

The book will be of interest to students in the humanities, to theoreticians of literature, to literary historians. Politics affects everybody, and is worth understanding through the eyes of the world’s most brilliant and imaginative minds.

Biography

Author(s):  Maria-Ana Tupan is full professor affiliated with the Doctoral School of Alba Iulia University, Romania. From 1991 to 2014 she taught courses in the history of British literature and in applied literary theory at Bucharest University. Fulbright Visiting Professor affiliated with Penn State University, USA (1994-5). She is the author of 17 books, book chapters and articles published in Romania, U.K., Germany, India, Australia and U.S.

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