Back in the mid-twentieth century, the political novel used to be a respectable field of study, commanding the attention of influential critics like Irwing Howe. These days, not so much. In fact, most scholarly books with the phrase ‘political novel’ in the title published over the past three decades or so were not written by professional critics, but rather by historians and political scientists (including Christopher Harvie, John Uhr, and Stuart A. Scheingold). As Anthony Hutchison (a rare contemporary defender of the genre) observes, this is the case because of the way modern literary studies came to think about literature and politics: because we have long internalized the Jamesian assumption that all literature is ultimately political, for many major works on the history of the novel published since the 1980s what is most interesting and most significant about a novel’s politics stands outside the narrowly political sphere. From this perspective, to turn to explicitly political novels---those focused on elections, political violence, and ideological conflicts---may seem either unnecessary or, worse, reactionary, because such a gesture draws attention away from all the less obvious ways in which the novel addressed political and social issues.

And yet, we surely still need a generic category that helps us understand novels that explicitly focus on such topics as electoral politics, social movements, ideological battles, violent rebellions, and international relations. This panel is built around the assumption that our own moment of persistent and global political turmoil is the precise moment to rethink the political novel and to do so on a global scale. 

While this seminar focuses on the present moment, we also welcome contributions that consider the history of the political novel and seek to rethink the relationship between contemporary and past iterations of the genre. It goes without saying that we welcome contributions focused on as many different linguistic and cultural traditions as possible.  

Some questions we might want to explore include:

What is specific about the political novel in the age of advanced globalization?

Can the political novel function as a transnational literary genre?

Is there such a thing as a global political novel?

What is the place of the political novel within the literary world system?

In what ways does the political novel offer opportunities to rethink our geopolitical realities? 

How does the political novel engage the forces of authoritarianism and populism? 

What narrative strategies are typical of the contemporary political novel?

How does the contemporary political novel draw on (and depart from) the legacy of its nineteenth and twentieth-century predecessors? 

How does the relationship between the center and the periphery play out in the field of political fiction?

Please submit your abstract directly at the ACLA submission portal: https://www.acla.org/seminar/a3e51113-a3b1-44b2-8deb-7e866b15f02d

The ACLA meeting will be held in Montreal, Canada between February 26 and March 1, 2026.