About The Political Novel Through the Lens of Gender

This Collection brings together selected contributions from the workshop The Political Novel through the Lens of Gender, which took place on 27 and 28 June 2024 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. The workshop was organised as part of the Horizon Europe project The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe (CAPONEU), which explores how literature – especially the novel – engages with political issues in different national and cultural contexts and thus contributes to shaping European societies and politics in the  21^st century. As a distinct literary and social phenomenon, the political novel is increasingly recognised not only in literary circles but also in broader social debates. CAPONEU aims to assess the political novel as an important part of Europe’s political, social and cultural heritage and as a tool for community building and political education.

The contributions in this Collection explore the intersections between political literature – particularly the novel – and contemporary feminist and queer criticism. They trace how decades of feminist and queer engagement with literature continue to influence the interpretation of the political novel in the contemporary context. Approaching the political novel through feminist and queer critical lenses, the authors address key issues that emerge at the intersection of a specific literary and critical corpus: from comparative and intermedial connections, to the role of authorship and critical reception in genre formation and canonisation, to close formalist readings of contemporary novels in European literatures.

Among the central questions discussed in the workshop and reflected upon in this volume are:

• How does the contemporary novel deal with political issues related to gender relations and how does it react to urgent political circumstances?
• How can feminist and queer perspectives re-evaluate the canon of the political novel and its dominant interpretations?
• How does the novel defy traditional historiographical and critical categories?
• In what ways does the novel as a genre shape and challenge feminist and queer literary theory and methodology?
• What role does the literary form play in defining the politics of the novel?
• How might the canon of the political novel be contextualised in a comparative and intermedial framework through the lens of feminist criticism?
• What is to role of the figure of the author and critical reception in the formation of the genre canon?
• What contribution can feminist and queer criticism make to mapping the political novel of the 20^th and 2^1st centuries?
• What is the educational value of feminist and queer approaches to literature and culture, both in formal academic contexts and beyond?

Together, these contributions offer rich insights into the ways in which gendered perspectives reshape our understanding of political literature and affirm the role of the novel as a dynamic space for political thought and cultural critique.


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

• What is the Political Novel? Defining the Genre
• The Political Novel in Historiographical and Sociological Perspective: Structures and Analogies