Political fiction

Not to be confused with Legal fiction

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Plato

More

Kochanowski

Cervantes

Swift

Voltaire

Niemcewicz

Dickens

Tolstoy

Bellamy

Prus

Political fiction is a subgenre of fiction that deals with political affairs. Political fiction has often used narrative to provide commentary on political events, systems and theories. Works of political fiction often "directly criticize an existing society or... present an alternative, sometimes fantastic, reality."^[1]

Prominent pieces of political fiction have included the anti-totalitarian dystopias of the early 20th century such as Jack London's The Iron Heel and Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. Equally influential, if not more so, however, have been earlier pieces of political fiction such as Gulliver's Travels (1726), Candide (1759) and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Political fiction frequently employs the literary modes of satire and utopia.

Subgenres

There are a number of subgenres of political fiction:

• Utopian fiction (see Utopian and dystopian fiction)
• Dystopian fiction (see Utopian and dystopian fiction)
• Social science fiction
• Assassination fiction (see Assassinations in fiction)

Notable Examples

This is a list of a few of the early or notable examples; others belong on the main list

• The Republic (ca. 360 BCE) by Plato

• Panchatantra (ca. 200 BCE) by Vishnu Sarma

• Utopia (1516) by Thomas More
• The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys (1578) by Jan Kochanowski

• Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes
• Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668) by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen
• The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan

• Persian Letters (1721) by Montesquieu
• Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift
• Candide (1759) by Voltaire
• The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) by Tobias Smollett
• Fables and Parables (1779) by Ignacy Krasicki
• The Return of the Deputy (1790) by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz

• The Partisan Leader (1836) by Nathaniel Beverley Tucker
• Barnaby Rudge (1841) by Charles Dickens
• The Betrothed (1842) by Alessandro Manzoni
• Coningsby (novel) (1844) by Benjamin Disraeli
• Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) by Benjamin Disraeli
• Tancred (1847) by Benjamin Disraeli
• Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens
• Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev
• The Palliser novels (1864–1879) by Anthony Trollope
• War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy
• Demons, also known as The Possessed or The Devils (1872), by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Gilded Age (1876) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
• Democracy: An American Novel (1880) by Henry Adams
• The Princess Casamassima (1886) by Henry James
• The Bostonians (1886) by Henry James
• Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy
• Pharaoh (1895) by Bolesław Prus

• Nostromo (1904) by Joseph Conrad
• The Iron Heel (1908) by Jack London
• Under Western Eyes (1911) by Joseph Conrad
• The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka
• The Castle (1926) by Franz Kafka
• Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
• Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945) by George Orwell
• Walden Two (1948) by B. F. Skinner
• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell
• Dark Green, Bright Red (1950) by Gore Vidal
• The Quiet American (1955) by Graham Greene
• Atlas Shrugged (1957) by Ayn Rand
• The Manchurian Candidate (1959) by Richard Condon
• The Comedians (1966) by Graham Greene
• Cancer Ward (1967) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Washington, D.C. (1967) by Gore Vidal
• Burr (1973) by Gore Vidal
• The Chocolate War (1974) by Robert Cormier
• Guerrillas (1975) by V. S. Naipaul
• 1876 (1976) by Gore Vidal
• Vineland (1990) by Thomas Pynchon

Science fiction

• The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) by Ursula Le Guin
• The Mars trilogy (1990s) by Kim Stanley Robinson

See also

• Politics in fiction

Notes

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