Democracy and the Novel in the US: An Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This introduction outlines the rationale and some of the key concerns of this special issue on democracy and the novel in the US. Beginning with George Saunders’s experiment with democratic form in Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), we turn to some points of tension that emerge in taking up the question of US democracy now. As many contributors observe, US liberal democracy was built upon practices of settler colonialism, slavery, racial capitalism, and xenophobia. And yet the danger posed by antidemocratic right-wing movements today makes the question of the relationship between the novel and democracy newly relevant. How, then, does the novel critique the violence of liberal democratic institutions? How do novels imagine alternative democratic possibilities? What do different subgenres of the novel—experimental, literary, speculative, pulp, graphic—offer in their understanding of democracy? And how have novels throughout US history—from the immediate post-Revolutionary period through Reconstruction, modernism, and through the 1960s to the present—treated the specific democratic and antidemocratic currents of their time?Perhaps this belief that novels can give insights into the failures of US liberal democracy even as they may speculate as to what alternative democratic forms will look like is one explanation why so many of our contributions hold out hope for the novel to retain—in one form or another—its long-argued connection to democracy.