Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination

This study gives insights into the process of "imagining history" and argues the case for a humanistic approach.

It shows how writers have brought alive in their work an individual struggle to comprehend some of the most important political phenomena to the 2Oth century.

Novelists are able to use empirical narratives as contexts within which they judge the robustness of competing constructions of historical reality.;Dr Horsley examines ironic, comic, tragic and romantic departures from a simple, objective model of enquiry and asks how each mode helps to clarify problems of historical understanding.

There is criticism of both British and American novels by Waugh, Conrad, Lawrence, Robert Penn Warren and Joseph Heller.