The current conception of political literature is still influenced, to a significant extent, by the commitment debate between Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács, in which the political power of the literary imagination rests either in its abstract freedom from political realities (Adorno), or in its close fidelity to them (Lukács).

This essay suggests that an understanding of James Kelman’s writing, as a singular form of political literature, requires us to move beyond this opposition. In blending a writing that is deeply committed to locality and to place with a writing affiliated to the abstractions of Kafka and Beckett, Kelman’s work suggests new ways of imagining the terms in which the mind is both free from and bound to its determining conditions. The essay offers a reading of Kelman’s later novels – Translated Accounts, You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free and pre-eminently Kiron Smith, boy – in order to develop an account of a political imagination that is attuned to the particular cleaving that Kelman performs, between freedom and servitude, between place and the dismantling of place.

The history of literature has long been viewed in its relationship to politics. For much of the twentieth century, we were schooled to find the politics of literature not in its acknowledged commitments but as lying deep within its unconsciously ideological structures and forms. The Introduction to the volume, as well as offering succinct summaries of the eighteen essays that make it up, calls for attending to literature’s political surfaces: to recognise that twentieth-century authors wrote in direct response to political movements, ideas, and events, that many were activists for or against them, and that literature and politics over the twentieth century coincided, overlapped, and clashed. Taking its cue from Toni Morrison’s unapologetic mixing of commitment and literature in her 1973 Foreword to Sula, the Introduction argues that several works by twentieth-century individuals were political in specific, open, and direct ways. This is of course not to say that these writers did not question literature’s relationship to politics, nor that they didn’t quiz literature’s ability to effect politics.

This chapter engages various philosophical attempts to define and delimit the essay, and to use the form to do a kind of philosophy that became increasingly urgent in the shadow of twentieth-century atrocities. The author considers theories of the essay by Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Walter Pater, and others.

This chapter revisits and transforms the idea, associated with Georg Lukács but an oft-unstated convention of literary studies, that the novel is the exemplary literary form of the capitalist era, arising from and expressing its basic logic and social relations. Its argument depends on a double specification: that what distinguishes the capitalist era is accumulation at a global scale; and that the realist novel’s paradigmatic trope, which Lukács calls “reconciliation,” refers not to a general social phenomenon but to the problematic individual’s reconciliation with social production, their internalization into the circuits that enable accumulation. Accumulation somewhere, that is to say, is the social basis of the novel. The chapter reads the contemporary political economy of the world-system, with the Eurozone – the realist novel’s home countries – as its leading case, and Greece as its irremediably problematic economy, arriving at the conclusion that as accumulation wanes, so must the novel itself.

The landmark texts of Asian American literature from the mid-twentieth century have often been classified as realist. Presenting “real-life” depictions of Japanese American incarceration during World War II and the immigrant experience, for instance, Asian American writing of the time is known for its referentiality to historical events. Recently, however, literary critics have sought to redefine the genre of realism, which has also led to a reconsideration of how canonical Asian American literature represented the deeper structure of Asian American life from 1930 to 1965. This chapter traces how Asian American literary critics have offered a more theoretically complex approach to realism in order to help draw out richer understandings of the way Asian American literature has articulated Asian American social experience. In addition, this entry provides brief readings of classic Asian American texts, notably John Okada’s No-No Boy and Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, through a realist frame.

This chapter traces the contours of Derek Walcott’s career from regional Caribbean author to English-based publishing success to relocation to the United States in the American university system. Shortly after the publication of Omeros in 1990, Walcott became the Caribbean region’s first writer of colour to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award associated with a wider recognition of a new Caribbean literary 'province' that had emerged in similar ways to the Irish and American 'provinces' of the early twentieth century. Omeros is an ambitious epic work that attempts to totalize both Walcott’s and the Caribbean region’s mixed indigenous, European, African and American heritages. But, like other earlier modernist epics, Omeros combines an exultant sense of literary accomplishment with anxieties of failure. As promises of new postcolonial beginnings for the Caribbean slide into visions of climate catastrophe, and as Walcott finds himself an émigré in an imperial and racist America, the poem oscillates between its affirmative and apocalyptic impulses.

This chapter examines Brecht’s complicated relationship with the German Democratic Republic and its leaders.In 1948, after the end of World War II, Brecht returned to Germany and ultimately settled in East Berlin in the GDR, where he became the artistic leader of the famous Berliner Ensemble, the most influential postwar theater group in the world. However, because of his revolutionary approach to drama and aesthetics, Brecht quickly ran into conflict with East German leaders and had to endure a series of criticisms and accusations against himself and his artistic collaborators. Brecht also sought to democratize and liberalize the artistic and cultural sphere of the GDR. Ultimately, Brecht’s relationship with socialist leaders in the GDR represented a push-pull and give-and-take. Each side had to compromise, and each side received something in return. Brecht received his own theater and the ability to perform plays as he wished, while the leaders of the GDR were able to bathe in the glory of Brecht’s international artistic success.

The focus of Chapter 3 is mainly on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. I argue that the expansion of social subsystems triggered by colonial modernity unfolds against a background of different historical rhythms, not all of which are explicitly foregrounded within the novels. I suggest that these barely visible overlapping histories generate a number of rhetorical sedimentations to the representation of both historical processes and the Igbo ethno-text (ethnographic details) that also illustrate the subtle and not-so-subtle disruptions of colonial modernity. To grasp the nature of the multi-synchronous historical character of these texts, I read both the historical and ethnographic details of Achebe’s novels as discursive thresholds rather than as cultural particularities. Thus, the characters Okonkwo and Ezeulu are both victims of historical transformations of which they are barely conscious.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, Okonkwo, Ezeulu, colonial modernity, colonial interpellation, Fanon, foundational narratives, gossip, osu (sacred caste), slavery in nineteenth-century West Africa, David Scott, Georg Lukács, the historical novel, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, volatile proximity between different historical lifeworlds, Christianity, ethical choice.