This website explores imaginative literature and literary criticism and social change, and in particular how the former two can contribute to the latter. The site is designed for, among others, activists and scholars, students and teachers, and readers and writers of literature who work for social change. [Politics and the Novel, and its political art article weblist, is an extension of this site.]

The lists of works on society and imaginative literature are rough and ready. I did not undertake a comprehensive search for criticism on imaginative literature and its social relationship, because I don't know how to do it and I don’t think it's possible - there is so much information available from so many different sources. The lists and excerpts, I put together over the span of a few months, mostly while teaching community college, but they grew out of a lot of concentrated reading along these lines that I've done in the past several years. During that time I came across the vast majority of the books by their being referenced or noted in other books, or, for a few, being mentioned online. Then, with that base, in a few months I did keyword searches of, for example, "politics," "novel," "social change," "propaganda" and so on at abebooks.com quite a bit (because the database is extensive and the keyword search is quite particular) and also somewhat at the Library of Congress website, plus amazon.com and some other search engines. That's how I collected a lot of the titles with the keywords but a lot of the good information on, say, propaganda and on social change is found in books without propaganda or social change in the title, as one might expect. So I'm familiar with, having read or read in, many of the books on the list, but some I've never laid eyes on, especially those on the keyword lists, recently searched for. Many of these I look forward to getting to at some point as a way of continuing to explore, organize and disseminate useful ideas related to literature and social change. The books also help and motivate me in my own imaginative writing.

Having lived far from a library of any size for seven years I purchased a number of these books second-hand, which helped a lot in generating the final lists and in excerpting and noting chapter titles of particular relevance or interest.

I don't necessarily agree with everything I've chosen to excerpt, and as far as the books go - as they seem to me - many are very good, plenty are solid, some are mixed, some are less insightful or unfortunate, and some are not very socially focused at all. On the whole, in my judgment, the books make some thoughtful and useful exploration of imaginative literature and its relation to society, as well as to individuals.

For more explanation about the bibliographies and excerpts, their context and critical tradition with its roots in the Enlightenment, see the lengthy excerpt of Edmund Wilson's "The Historical Interpretation of Literature" and my prefatory remarks.

I'm glad to receive suggestions and information regarding other works and activities of and about imaginative literature and social change. 

-Tony Christini [tc@socialit.org]