About What is the Political Novel? Defining the Genre.

The project “The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe” (CAPONEU) examines how literature, and the novel in particular, addresses political issues in different national and cultural contexts and thus contributes to shaping European societies and politics in the 21st century. What we call and defend as the political novel is currently gaining importance not only in strictly defined literary circles, but also in European societies as a whole.

This Collection brings together selected contributions to the first annual CAPONEU conference, which took place in Berlin from 27 to 29 September 2023. The participants discussed a variety of understandings of the political novel as a (tentative) genre. They combined approaches to defining the political novel that are characterised by genre theory with those that are shaped by the history of the genre, thus also paradigmatically illustrating this changeable category in relation to specific novels that have emerged in heterogeneous contexts.
Speakers were invited to historicise the various forms of the political novel and to identify the aesthetic, epistemic, political, ethical, moral etc. preferences that determine both their own and the historical understanding of what is (not) considered a political novel.

The questions that were discussed at the conference included the following:

• What classification criteria have been commonly used to recognise a particular novel as political?
• Does the genre of the political novel – aesthetically – relate to the political issues raised, author’s ideology, social background, space of origin etc.? Can we speak of different aesthetics of the political novel (left, right, liberal; politics of perception, politics of intervention; etc.)?
• How do different kinds of agents (writers, readers, scholars, critics etc.) and competing publics constitute the political novel in distinctive ways?
• Are particular historical manifestations of the political novel related to specific historical and political developments? Does the political novel flourish under particular historical conditions and become less prevalent under different circumstances?
• Are there constants across time periods? How does the contemporary political novel in Europe reflect on or relate to its 20th-century antecedents?
• Is the political novel a translatable genre? How does it travel across cultures, political systems and geographical and economic areas? How does this affect its form?
• How does reading political novels raise political awareness? How does it differ from reading other genres such as poetry and drama?
• How can reading and talking about political novels generate, promote, and change political discussions?
• Who has access to political novels, and what cultural and social barriers might exist that exclude people from this literary form?

This Collection is part of a series of CAPONEU Collections - the sister Collections can be found below:

• The Political Novel in Historiographical and Sociological Perspective: Structures and Analogies
• The Political Novel Through the Lens of Gender