George Lamming’s novels (1953–1972) are legible as novels of ideas in at least three senses. All six devote substantial space to exchanges of ideas or solitary philosophical reflection. All feature characters who allegorize ideas or serve as vehicles for their enunciation. And all are narratively propelled by figures intensely devoted to an aspiration, cause, model, or imagined destiny. Lamming’s own remarks on his attraction to the novel of ideas, along with his representation of Toussaint L’Ouverture in the nonfictional Pleasures of Exile, underscore how in Lamming ideas are not (as has been asserted of other novels of ideas) decorative or disconnected from mundane existence. Rather, they emerge from the enduring matrix of colonialism in a way that renders obsessives different in degree, rather than kind, from (post)colonial subjects whose daily experience shapes them in less evidently striking ways.

A key feature of the novel of ideas is the prominent role of debates between characters that stage political, philosophical, and ideological differences. Often seen as an especially artificial feature of the genre, character-character dialogue is typically contrasted unfavorably with indirect speech and narratorial description of psychological states. This opposition plays into an implicitly modernism-valorizing view and, ultimately, a privileging of the representation and analysis of thought over the representation of speech. As such, it dovetails in an interesting way with a consequential divide within literary history between idea-driven narrative and an allegedly more nuanced psychological and moral realism. Refusing this opposition, this essay considers nineteenth-century novelistic approaches to moral and political ideas around equality and justice through a complex lens involving the interplay between ruminative states and moments of punctual character-character dialogue. Authors discussed include Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot.

This chapter explores the work of Hanif Kureishi and, in particular, his 1995 novel The Black Album. Set in London in 1989, the novel engages with the fall of the Berlin Wall, with terrorism, and, most prominently, with the Rushdie Affair. It stages debates around religion, free speech, and cultural identity. Kureishi conceives of multiculturalism as premised on a vibrant exchange of ideas, and in The Black Album he portrays Islamism – and, by extension, fundamentalism of any kind – as a pseudo-idea which can only constitute a threat to, and never a part of, an effective multiculturalism. However, this chapter identifies a key paradox in The Black Album: it implores readers to treat ideas seriously, and yet there is very little serious treatment of particular ideas in the novel itself. As such, Kureishi’s novel is far more invested in the idea of ideas than in any particular body of them.

This chapter explores the close, if often vexed, relationship between the novel and the Republic towards the end of the nineteenth century. It examines how the dominant aesthetic of prose fiction in this period, naturalism, framed itself as an ally of democracy – most directly with its expansion of the novel’s horizons to include, and do justice to, the experience, idiom, and political claims of the working classes. The political use of the naturalist novel as a critical document of social life resided, as Émile Zola saw it, precisely in its declared objectivity. But the form of naturalist fiction produced more contradictions than its theory allowed. This chapter returns the evolution of the naturalist novel to its political context, while tracking the rise of its rival forms (Symbolist and Decadent literature; the psychological novel), which often repudiated those central tenets of the Republic: positivism, scientism, democracy, anti-clericalism. Maurice Barrès and Paul Bourget scrutinised the academic and intellectual principles of a generation schooled by the Third Republic, in ways which offered an alternative pedagogy. By the time of the Dreyfus Affair, the novel had become a prime vehicle for conflicting ideological visions of a nation that was increasingly divided against itself.

This chapter provides an overview of the novel of ideas that contrasts the form with Henry James’s modernist conception of the art novel. Ian McEwan writes exemplary novels of ideas insofar as his works incorporate political, philosophical and above all scientific ideas even as they develop formal, stylistic and aesthetic complexity. After discussing Or Shall We Die? and The Ploughman’s Lunch, the chapter examines four novels: Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Saturday and particularly The Child in Time. McEwan’s novels of ideas consistently explore and demonstrate unexpected capabilities of the genre. They unfold the drama and texture of their ideational content, from the level of plot device and set piece down to that of lexical units. Ideas animate but never overwhelm aesthetics. McEwan’s novels of ideas explore the capacities and capabilities of scientific inquiry and literary representation even as they ultimately reveal the limits of both.