Political fiction employs narrative to comment on political events, systems and theories. Works of political fiction, such as political novels, often "directly criticize an existing society or present an alternative, even fantastic, reality".""HIST 294 - Political Fiction", Wesleyan University, accessed 12 December 2005 The political novel overlaps with the social novel, proletarian novel, and social science fiction.
Plato's Republic, a Socratic dialogue written around 380 BC, has been one of the world's most influential works of philosophy and political theory, both intellectually and historically.National Public Radio (August 8, 2007). Plato's 'Republic' Still Influential, Author Says. Talk of the Nation.Plato: The Republic. Plato: His Philosophy and his life, allphilosophers.com The Republic is concerned with justice (δικαιοσύνη), the order and character of the just city-state, and the just man.Brickhouse, Thomas and Smith, Nicholas D. Plato (c. 427–347 BC), The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, University of Tennessee, cf. Dating Plato's Dialogues. Other influential politically themed works include Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), Voltaire's Candide (1759), and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).
Political fiction frequently employs satire, often in the utopian and dystopian genres. This includes totalitarian dystopias of the early 20th century such as Jack London's The Iron Heel, Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Political satire The Greek playwright Aristophanes' plays are known for their political and social satire, particularly in his criticism of the powerful Athenian general, Cleon, in plays such as The Knights. Aristophanes is also notable for the persecution he underwent. Aristophanes' plays turned upon images of filth and disease. His bawdy style was adopted by Greek dramatist-comedian Menander, whose early play, Drunkenness, contains an attack on the politician, Callimedon.
Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (1729) is an 18th-century Juvenalian satirical essay in which he suggests that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. The satirical hyperbole mocks heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as British policy toward the Irish in general.
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an allegorical and dystopian novella which satirises the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Soviet Union's Stalinist era. Orwell, a democratic socialist,Orwell, George. "Why I Write" (1936) (The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 1 – An Age Like This 1945–1950 p. 23 (Penguin)) was a critic of Joseph Stalin and was hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism—an attitude that had been shaped by his experiences during the Spanish Civil War.Gordon Bowker, Orwell p. 224; Orwell, writing in his review of Franz Borkenau's The Spanish Cockpit in Time and Tide, 31 July 1937, and "Spilling the Spanish Beans", New English Weekly, 29 July 1937 The Soviet Union, he believed, had become a brutal dictatorship, built upon a cult of personality and enforced by a reign of terror. Orwell described his Animal Farm as "a satirical tale against Stalin", and in his essay "Why I Write" (1946) he wrote that Animal Farm was the first book in which he tried, with full consciousness of what he was doing, "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole."
Orwell's most famous work, however, is Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949), many of whose terms and concepts, such as Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Room 101, telescreen, 2 + 2 = 5, and memory hole, have entered into common use. Nineteen Eighty-Four popularised the adjective "Orwellian", which describes official deception, secret surveillance, and manipulation of recorded history by a totalitarian or authoritarian state.The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Sixth Edition. University of Oxford Press: 2000. p. 726.
16th-century novel The poet Jan Kochanowski's play The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys (1578), the first tragedy written in the Polish language, recounts an incident leading up to the Trojan War. Its theme of the responsibilities of statesmanship resonates to the present day.Stefan Kieniewicz, ed., Warszawa w latach 1526–1795 (Warsaw in the Years 1526–1795), vol. II, Warsaw, 1984, , pp. 157–58.
The book Utopia (1516), written by Sir Thomas More, talk about a story of a different world compared to the one they live in. The character Thomas More is sent by King Henry VIII of England to negotiate the English wool trade. There he meets a man by the name Raphael Hythloday. He is a man that has been to the island on Utopia. He explains to More how their entire philosophy is to find happiness and share everything collectively; in this society, money does not exist, which starkly contrasts with the ascendant commercial empires in Thomas More's Europe.
18th-century novel The political comedy The Return of the Deputy (1790), by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz—Polish poet, playwright, statesman, and comrade-in-arms of Tadeusz Kościuszko—was written in about two weeks' time while Niemcewicz was serving as a deputy to the historic Four-Year Sejm of 1788–92. The comedy's premiere in January 1791 was an enormous success, sparking widespread debate, royal communiques, and diplomatic correspondence. As Niemcewicz had hoped, it set the stage for passage of Poland's epochal Constitution of 3 May 1791, which is regarded as Europe's first, and the world's second, modern written national constitution, after the United States Constitution implemented in 1789. The comedy pits proponents against opponents of political reforms: of abolishing the destabilizing free election of Poland's kings; of abolishing the legislatively destructive liberum veto; of granting greater rights to peasants and townspeople; of curbing the privileges of the mostly self-interested noble class; and of promoting a more active Polish role in international affairs, in the interest of stopping the depredations of Poland's neighbors, Russia, Prussia, and Austria (who will in 1795 complete the dismemberment of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth). Romantic interest is provided by a rivalry between a reformer and a conservative for a young lady's hand—which is won by the proponent of reforms.Zdzisław Skwarczyński, wstęp (introduction) to Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Powrót posła (The Return of the Deputy), Wrocław, Ossolineum, 1983.
19th-century novel An early example of the political novel is The Betrothed (1827) by Alessandro Manzoni, an Italian historical novel. Set in northern Italy in 1628, during the oppressive years of direct Spanish rule, it has been seen sometimes as a veiled attack on the Austrian Empire, which controlled Italy at the time the novel was written. It has been called the most famous and widely read novel in the Italian language.Archibald Colquhoun. Manzoni and his Times. J. M. Dent & Sons, London, 1954.
In the 1840s British politician Benjamin Disraeli wrote a trilogy of novels with political themes. With Coningsby; or, The New Generation (1844), Disraeli, in historian Robert Blake's view, "infused the novel genre with political sensibility, espousing the belief that England's future as a world power depended not on the complacent old guard, but on youthful, idealistic politicians.""Benjamin Disraeli 1804–1881", Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, eNotes, accessed 25 August 2013 Coningsby was followed by Sybil; or, The Two Nations (1845), another political novel, which was less idealistic and more clear-eyed than Coningsby; the "two nations" of its subtitle referred to the huge economic and social gap between the privileged few and the deprived working classes. The last of Disraeli's political-novel trilogy, Tancred; or, The New Crusade (1847), promoted the Church of England's role in reviving Britain's flagging spirituality.
Ivan Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons (1862) as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between Russia's liberals of the 1830s and 1840s, and the growing Russian nihilist movement among their sons. Both the nihilists and the 1830s liberals sought Western-based social change in Russia. Additionally, these two modes of thought were contrasted with the Slavophiles, who believed that Russia's path lay in its traditional spirituality. Turgenev's novel was responsible for popularizing the use of the term "nihilism", which became widely used after the novel was published.
The Polish writer Bolesław Prus' novel, Pharaoh (1895), is set in the Egypt of 1087–85 BCE as that country experiences internal stresses and external threats that will culminate in the fall of its Twentieth Dynasty and New Kingdom. The young protagonist Ramses learns that those who would challenge the powers that be are vulnerable to co-option, seduction, subornation, defamation, intimidation, and assassination. Perhaps the chief lesson, belatedly absorbed by Ramses as pharaoh, is the importance, to power, of knowledge. Prus' vision of the fall of an ancient civilization derives some of its power from the author's intimate awareness of the final demise of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, a century before he completed Pharaoh. This is a political awareness that Prus shared with his 10-years-junior novelist compatriot, Joseph Conrad, who was an admirer of Prus' writings. Pharaoh has been translated into 23 languages and adapted as a 1966 Polish feature film.Christopher Kasparek, "Prus' Pharaoh and Curtin's Translation", The Polish Review, vol. XXXI, nos. 2-3, 1986, p. 129. It is also known to have been Joseph Stalin's favourite book.Christopher Kasparek, "Prus' Pharaoh and Curtin's Translation", p. 128.
20th-century novel Joseph Conrad wrote several novels with political themes: Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911). Nostromo (1904) is set amid political upheaval in the fictitious South American country of Costaguana, where a trusted Italian-descended longshoreman, Giovanni Battista Fidanza—the novel's eponymous "Nostromo" (Italian for "our man")—is instructed by English-descended silver-mine owner Charles Gould to take Gould's silver abroad so that it will not fall into the hands of revolutionaries.Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, 1904. The role of politics is paramount in The Secret Agent, as the main character, Verloc, works for a quasi-political organisation. The plot to destroy Greenwich Observatory is in itself anarchistic. Vladimir asserts that the bombing "must be purely destructive" and that the anarchists who will be implicated as the architects of the explosion "should make it clear that [they] are perfectly determined to make a clean sweep of the whole social creation.". However, the political form of anarchism is ultimately controlled in the novel: the only supposed politically motivated act is orchestrated by a secret government agency. Conrad's third political novel, Under Western Eyes, is connected to Russian history. Its first audience read it against the backdrop of the failed Revolution of 1905 and in the shadow of the movements and impulses that would take shape as the revolutions of 1917. Conrad's earlier novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), also had political implications, in its depiction of European colonial depredations in Africa, which Conrad witnessed during his employ in the Belgian Congo.The Norton Anthology, 7th edition, 2000, p. 1957.