Abstract
In this chapter I address the issue of the “politics” of representation in fiction: how or in what sense authors can adequately represent a social class, in this case, a ruling elite. I argue that the four novels I study are complex fictive “imaginaries” that, on the one hand, embody the inherent point of view and biases of their authors but, on the other hand, taken as a group, offer us a reliable, even sociologically valid, portrayal of a significant faction of America’s ruling elite in the last half of the twentieth century. I also explicate the three key concepts in this study: Political Fiction, the Washington Novel, and Elite Theory. I only deal with political fiction that focuses on the actual workings of our national government, which is one sub-genre of the Washington Novel, and use as a framework for my analysis, Elite Theory.
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Notes
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For a bibliography and commentary on the full range of American political novels since the nineteenth century, see Milne (1966).
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To the agency of authors and characters, Cora Kaplan (2000, 12) adds the “the agency of particular genres and discourses,” such as the novel, whose ideology may express or constitute “the hegemony of the middle classes or of their political instrument, the nation.”
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Smit, D. (2019). Introduction. In: Power and Class in Political Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8_1
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