Tragic Form and Comic Effects in the Novel of Ideas

Chair: Dr Bryan Radley

The novel of ideas occupies a curious position within the literary academy. Critics have tended to respond with a degree of embarrassment to novels that tackle moral, philosophical or political problems by involving characters and narrators in argumentative dialogue. Sianne Ngai (to take only one example) has recently classified the novel of ideas as a ‘gimmick’: ‘intrinsically un-novelistic’, a ‘self-interpreting artwork’. This paper begins by tracing a brief history of critical antipathy to the novel of ideas, from Henry James and F.R. Leavis to more recent critics. I then move to a defence of the form. Drawing on the work of Amanda Anderson, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, György Lukács, Mary McCarthy and David Scott, I show how sympathetic theoretical accounts of the novel of ideas tend to read it in terms of tragic seriousness: Lukács and Scott, for example, adapt Hegel’s theory of ‘collision’ in tragic drama to portray how ideas come into conflict in the novel. But while the serious novel of ideas (from George Eliot to Doris Lessing and beyond) remains a vibrant tradition, arguably the most striking twentieth-century development was the comic novel of ideas: a significant modern form that has not attracted much in the way of theoretical description. I conclude by turning to some comic novels of ideas by Rose Macaulay, exploring some of the ways comic effects can disrupt, destabilise, or invert the workings of the serious novel of ideas.

Matthew Taunton is an Associate Professor in Literature in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at UEA. His most recent books are Red Britain: the Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture (OUP, 2019) and A History of 1930s British Literature (CUP, 2019) (co-edited with Benjamin Kohlmann).  He is currently working with Rachel Potter on a co-edited volume entitled The British Novel of Ideas: George Eliot to Zadie Smith, which is forthcoming with CUP in 2023. This paper has developed out of that collaborative project.