The fascist counter-revolutions and reactionary insurgencies that disfigured Europe across the ‘Thirty Years War’ 1914–45 generated, in the realm of literature, art, music, and periodical publication, a complex culture of resistance in anti-fascism. More than the sum of its socialist, liberal democratic, Communist and feminist parts, anti-fascism formed a distinct cultural sphere in Europe and the United States, with its own newspapers, journals, publishing styles, and audiences. The links it forged between European and non-European poets and writers focused on the threat of fascism in Austria, Germany, and Italy, provoked, in turn, questions about the nature of European colonial war abroad, gender relations in democratic nations, and the sources of fascism’s strength. Paying particular attention to both the place of gender in the anti-fascist imagination, by way of a reading of Virginia Woolf, and the anti-colonial challenge anti-fascism faced, this chapter explores literary responses to fascism.

This chapter looks at the literary and cultural legacy of the 1947 India-Pakistan partition to uncover and interrogate some motifs that are associated with political partitions – that they are inevitable and all-pervasive, that they are violent, that they are moments of complete disorder, and, most importantly, that they are examples of imperial powers getting things wrong. In this chapter, I explore the ramifications this historiographical narrative has had on the production and reception of partition literature, and argue that across multiple genres of literary texts, characters are depicted as bewildered or confused by the events happening around them, and that this confusion has important political ramifications for the nature of partition, and for our understandings of the extent to which people who lived through partition experienced agency over the trajectory of their own lives.

The political struggles that delivered the first wave of independent Caribbean nation states are often retrospectively characterised under the banner of nationalism, but it is important to acknowledge the diversity of ideologies and affiliations that were involved in the transition towards non-colonial sovereignty. This chapter explores the role that writers and imaginative writings played in shaping alternative political imaginaries in the Anglophone Caribbean region from the 1920s to the 1960s. Its arguments expand the terrain of literary nationalisms beyond the now canonical fictions of male Windrush generation novelists writing at the mid-century. It attends to the nascent nationalism invoked by literary projects at the turn of the century, considers the role assigned to the writer in the short-lived project of Anglophone regional Federation between 1958 and 1962 that predated the constitution of nation states, and explores how Pan-African and Black Atlantic movements powerfully shaped the decolonial literary imagination in the early twentieth century. It also acknowledges the crucial role that women played in male-centred histories and politically engaged literary traditions.

This chapter opens with a brief survey of suffrage literature and the scholarship it has generated before honing in on a particular example: Constance Maud’s No Surrender. This novel conforms to many characteristics of suffrage fiction, playing on romance conventions and integrating fictionalised episodes from the real-world campaign. But even as No Surrender is a campaigning novel, it is also a novel of a campaign that registers and reflects the tensions that characterised the movement. Social class was a deeply contentious issue for the campaign and is one this chapter considers with a focus on Maud’s presentation of Lancashire mill-worker, Jenny Clegg. Maud’s novel raises questions about representation, authenticity, and appropriation, questions that have troubled feminist theory and practice. This chapter suggests that a fuller familiarity with the internal debates of the campaign – particularly those between adult and woman suffragists – results in a more precise sense of how the novel works as propaganda. A corollary of such a contextual approach is that more self-reflexive and self-questioning currents in No Surrender that run parallel to its primary propagandising ones are made visible.

Gay, lesbian, and trans rights movements had similar social, cultural, and political goals, the latter of which included changing laws and policies in order to gain new rights, benefits, and protections from harm, goals which are sought both in the civil and political spheres. The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s marked a new era for gay political activism and the emergence of lesbian direct action groups, such as Lesbian Avengers (1992). In the UK, Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1986, which banned mention of homosexuality in schools, sharpened the need for political organising and resistance. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Gender Recognition Act (2004) in the UK restored some of the rights lost to trans people in the previous century. This chapter explores the relationship between late twentieth-century literature and sexual rights. It asks what a book can do to advance the political case for sexual rights, as well as showing how a book might provide a much-needed textual space for self-imagining and self-determination, for the sexual or gender minority subject literally written out of the socio-cultural and political mainstream.

This essay explores how the African novel has confronted the problem of nation and nationalism. While Europe had centuries to adapt to the centrifugal processes of nation formation, Africa had no such luxury of time. The work of nationhood in Africa was a shock imposition, and this shock was captured by African writers in and as storytelling of fragmentation, disruption, and the eventual dissociation of the protagonists from the project of national and individual psychological development. African writers’ turn to the interior – in novels, epics, or praise-songs – was, in fact, a political gesture. Bringing into discussion writers from René Maran to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ousmane Sembène, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Tutuola to Ahmadou Kourouma, Maryse Condé, as well as writers associated with the Afropolitan like Chris Abani, Taiye Selasi, and NoViolet Bulawayo, this chapter demonstrates how twentieth-century African literature fought to find the space in which the complex dialectic engagement between the individual psyche and the world can be staged and reimagined.

This chapter considers the connections between modern Irish literature and the politics of nationalism, rebellion, partition, and sectarianism. It discusses key moments in the evolution of Irish culture and writing, including the 1798 rebellion, the revolutionary period of 1916–22, and the 1998 Belfast Agreement. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) registered the decisive impact of the fall in 1890 of the parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, on the country and its literature. W. B Yeats seized on this moment of political crisis in order to launch a movement for cultural revival. Yet most Irish writing in the independent Irish state after 1922, although hostile to Catholic hegemony and to the censorship of art, was counter-revolutionary rather than aesthetically or politically radical. While Beckett explored the legacies of an experimental Irish modernism from Paris, realist novelists, such as John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, dominated the domestic scene. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the generation of poets and critics that emerged from Northern Ireland after the 1960s, including Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin, and Seamus Heaney.

This chapter explores the politicisation of literature during the period of the Cold War. It argues that literature became a key coin in the cultural cold war, invested with the power to represent working-class subjectivity and class struggle by the Soviets, and construed as embodying and igniting individual liberty by the US. Literary writers and literature, during the cultural cold war, were both censored and funded as never before. While the Soviets took control of book production by both censoring and funding writers, the US pumped enormous sums of money into funding global literature deemed representative of individual freedoms. The literary dissident, stifled by the East and lionised by the West, was a key figure in cultural cold war politics. The chapter focuses on two very different kinds of writers, Stephen Spender and Doris Lessing, who were shaped by the conditions of the cultural cold war. Both writers viewed their literary writing in the light of the politics of the Cold War, and used their writing to explore the political issues of censorship, freedom, and dissidence.

Some of the most celebrated writers of the 1930s generation dabbled with Marxist politics, but later renounced their earlier political commitments. A Cold War critical consensus emerged that saw Communism and its socialist realist theory of art as deadening forces, that were incompatible with good writing. Shifting the focus to some less canonical figures, the chapter sees the relationship between Communism and literature in the 1930s as a more productive one. The chapter focuses on three ‘conversion narratives’, whose protagonists move from false consciousness to political commitment: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair. These novels have complicated relationships to socialist realism. They want to cut through ideological fog and to see ‘reality as it is’ and ‘whither it is moving’ (in Radek’s phrase), but they use modernist literary techniques to this end, and grapple with epistemological doubt. They also complicate the traditional Marxist emphasis on class by putting it into dialogue with gender, sexuality, race, national identity, and rural identity.

Since the 1970s, Indigenous activists have fought for the recognition of Indigenous rights both nationally and internationally, a fight that arguably culminated in the passage of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People in 2007. Despite this victory, however, state actors continue to violate Indigenous rights, a violation that this chapter argues stems from the disaggregation of Indigenous rights from Indigenous law. In other words, Indigenous peoples residing within the borders of settler-colonial nation states, including the United States and Canada, are recognised as rights-bearing individuals and collectives, but these states still refuse to recognise the existence of independent, extra-colonial Indigenous legal systems. This phenomenon is a particular concern of contemporary Indigenous writers, including Michi Saagig Anishinaabe writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, whose poem “jiibay or aandizooke” demonstrates how settler legal systems that operate without regard for Indigenous law suppress the latter. Simpson’s work demonstrates why Indigenous rights and law must be recognised together.

Black nationalism has featured prominently in twentieth-century African-American social and political thought and refers to a set of ideologies that concern the relationship of people of African descent to the US nation state. This chapter tracks the emergence of modern Black nationalism in the mid-twentieth century and exposes how it is a discourse concerned with redefining both racial and gender identity. Paying particular attention to the work of Black women writers, the essay illustrates how the interface of literature and politics under the aegis of Black nationalism becomes a space for exploring and disrupting gender ideologies. Gender politics provides a foundation for some articulations of Black nationalism through the hierarchical rhetoric of the ‘promise of protection’, in which women ostensibly trade safety for social power and agency. Through an analysis of Alice Walker’s short story collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), the essay illuminates the artistic engagement of nationalist thought and showcases the danger and falseness of the promise of protection, showing both the potential and limits of the influential social logic of nationalism.

This chapter argues that the later twentieth-century novel can be read as an expression and a critique of the economic and political logic of neoliberalism. In works from Muriel Spark’s The Takeover, to James Kelman’s How Late it Was How Late, to Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the novel form registers a certain shallowness of perception and of affect, that can be seen as a corollary to the dematerialising effects of late capitalism. But if this is so, the chapter argues that we should not read the novel of the period as simply symptomatic of the corrosive influence of late capital on our forms of realism. Rather, the shallow intensities that we find in Spark, Roth, and Kelman are the marks of a new form of fictional critique that is developing in the period, one that attends to a shift in the way that culture is reproduced under twentieth-century neoliberal conditions.