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Of course it is political. It's a great novel and all great novels are inherently political. What we think of as political novels, are usually those with overt messages, and those tend to be bad.
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I think there’s a difference between the act of writing and the subject matter. The act of writing is political (a call out into the wild) but not all writing is political in subject matter? Sometimes writing is both. It’s bad when it’s no longer art though.
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I was asked to teach a grad seminar in contemporary US political novels a few years ago. Couldn’t really come to a fully satisfying definition. Some (like Howe) argue that it’s a novel that makes politics an explicit focus. But political effect can be found in almost any lit…
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What about time,place and genre? Not sure but realist fiction set in our time seem to take on more political lens. In response to all personal is political, Azar Nafisi wrote in Reading Lolita in Tehran that at the heart of political is the desire to protect the personal.
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