"This book attempts to develop a genuinely dialectical theory of the novel through a critical evaluation of the work of Lukács, Goldmann and Gramsci. By taking the novel form and relating this to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony the analysis allows both for the writer’s own praxis within his social group and society as well as the praxis within the novel itself. The development of nineteenth-century realism is examined within this framework and an attempt is made to link the evolution of modernism and socialist realism to hegemony. The book then focuses on a selected number of novels which have as their theme either revolution or the threat of revolution, the ways in which these novels reflect both the revolutionary aspects of realism and its conservative aspects, and in particular the question of freedom within the novel form itself. It is argued that with Solzhenitsyn this sense of freedom--praxis as opposed to determinism--is characteristic of his fiction. In the novels of Gissing, Zamyatin, London, Koestler, and Serge there is a closed rather than open structure which links directly with the nineteenth-century tradition. Throughout the book there is an attempt to show how the novels can be understood in terms of the values within them, these values being the writer’s extrapolation from his group membership. Thus Solzhenitsyn is linked sociologically with the dissident movement, and Serge with the defeated socialist movement.
Dr Alan Swingewood is Lecturer in Sociology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of The Sociology of Literature (with D. F. Laurenson) and Marx and Modern Social Theory, and he has contributed various articles to English and American magazines on Marxism, social theory and literary theory and criticism."