Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Political fiction

Political fiction

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."

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.

Contents

  • 1 Notable Examples
  • 2 Science fiction

Notable Examples

  • 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 Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair
  • The Iron Heel (1908) by Jack London
  • Under Western Eyes (1911) by Joseph Conrad
  • Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  • The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka
  • The Castle (1926) by Franz Kafka
  • The Shadow of the Caudillo (1929) by Martín Luis Guzmán
  • Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
  • The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma (1932) by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz
  • Antoine Bloye (1933) by Paul Nizan
  • The President (1933, published 1946) by Miguel Ángel Asturias
  • It Can't Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis
  • Darkness at Noon (1940) by Arthur Koestler
  • Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945) by George Orwell
  • All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren
  • Lonely Crusade (1947) by Chester Himes
  • Walden Two (1948) by B. F. Skinner
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell
  • Dark Green, Bright Red (1950) by Gore Vidal
  • The Outsider (1953) by Richard Wright
  • The Quiet American (1955) by Graham Greene
  • Atlas Shrugged (1957) by Ayn Rand
  • The Ugly American (1958) by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick
  • The Manchurian Candidate (1959) by Richard Condon
  • Advise and Consent (1959) by Allen Drury
  • The Golden Notebook (1962) by Doris Lessing
  • Seven Days in May (1962) by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey
  • The Comedians (1966) by Graham Greene
  • The Late Bourgeois World (1966) by Nadine Gordimer
  • Cancer Ward (1967) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Reasons of State (1974) by Alejo Carpentier
  • I, the Supreme (1974) by Augusto Roa Bastos
  • The Chocolate War (1974) by Robert Cormier
  • The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • Guerrillas (1975) by V. S. Naipaul
  • The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) by Edward Abbey
  • Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976) by Manuel Puig
  • The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood
  • Anthills of the Savannah (1987) by Chinua Achebe
  • Vineland (1990) by Thomas Pynchon
  • Blindness (1995) by Jose Saramago
  • Primary Colors (1996) by Joe Klein (as "Anonymous")
  • The Gospel According To Larry (2003) by Janet Tashjian
  • Seeing (2004) by Jose Saramago
  • The Polity of Beasts (2007) by Renald Iacovelli
  • The Writing on the Wall (2007) by Hannes Artens

Science fiction

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

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