The Russian ‘thick journal’, from its inception in the early 1800s to the present day, is at once a cultural institution, an index of intellectual life, and an important publishing mechanism. During the nineteenth century, the temporal focus of this chapter, Russia’s low literacy rate, poorly developed distribution networks, and virtual absence of inexpensive editions of high-quality literature gave the monthly thick journal a central place in Russian culture. From the 1840s until the 1880s, the thick journals published every subsequently canonical Russian novel except for Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, alongside works of criticism, history, philosophy, the natural sciences, and the social sciences, creating an expanding galaxy of discourses, many of which would migrate into the thematics and styles of the fictions they surrounded. That writers often began serialisation before completely drafting their novels made these fictions more open to such migration.

This Introduction surveys the long, inextricable relationship between American politics and the American novel in the twentieth century. After defining twentieth-century “politics” broadly as the theoretical intersection between power, freedom, and justice within the framework of American liberalism, it explains why the American novel is a unique aperture through which to view political conflict and change, arguing that the novel form illuminates how official power relations overlap with personal power relations. While surveying previous scholarship on American politics and the novel, it explains why the volume does not restrict itself to the narrow subgenre of “political fiction.” The Introduction then addresses the rationale for each major section: “Ideologies and Movements,” “The Politics of Genre and Form,” and “Case Studies.” It concludes by considering how a robust engagement with the politics of the twentieth-century American novel can help us make sense of our political present.