Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) was published when the centrism of Cold War liberalism was supplanting the radical, multiethnic working-class collectivism characteristic of the liberal-left Popular Front and New Deal. In 1949, amid sharpening conflicts with the US’s recent ally the Soviet Union, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s spatial trope of the “vital center” redefined the US political landscape to situate, as constitutive of a new liberalism, the extremist affirmation of American national values and institutions against conflated radicalisms of right and left. While Invisible Man is often read as aligned with vital center liberalism – and as declaring African American commitment to its ethos – this chapter recovers the more idiosyncratic and radical theorization of power, institutions, and social change in the novel. Like Schlesinger, Ellison uses a spatial trope – the depths or underground – to anchor a political intervention. Motivated by the threat of nuclear apocalypse, Ellison uses that trope to critique sociopolitical institutions whose actions betray the underlying egalitarian and collective ideals they proclaim. Ellison applies this critique to Marxian and Black nationalist movements, as well as to mainstream American economic and political institutions, thus crafting a singular reformulation of political radicalism for the postwar era.

This chapter lays out the reasons that the verse novel has been unusually prominent in Australia, considering key examples such as Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994), a lesbian detective thriller, and the four other significant verse novels she composed, to the late 1980s trio of Laurie Duggan (The Ash Range), John A. Scott (St Clair) and Alan Wearne (The Nightmarkets). It then goes on to discuss Indigenous and Asian-Australian practitioners of the verse novel form such as Ali Cobby Eckermann and Ivy Alvarez.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s lifelong friend and companion Gustave de Beaumont produced a literary work based on their visit to the United States. Beaumont’s 1835 novel Marie, ou l’Esclavage aux Etats Unis, explored themes of race, manners, and equality in American society. Although Democracy in America is not a work of literature per se, it does contain a remarkable number of literary vignettes that give the work a distinctively literary quality. As Christine Dunn Henderson argues in this chapter, Tocqueville’s literary portraiture is a consistent rhetorical device throughout the book. His recourse to literary vignettes as a way of illustrating dimensions of race, religion, and American manners demonstrates the evocative power of literature to convey moral lessons by appealing to emotions rather than reason. In this regard, Tocqueville’s rhetorical strategy of sympathy and imaginative identification is reminiscent of Adam Smith’s use of vignettes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America alongside Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy reveals striking similarities and differences in how the two authors treat the entanglement of indigenous, black, and white histories from seventeenth-century America to the present. Both texts use vivid literary imagery to make concrete some of the intersectional dilemmas of race and gender. In Tocqueville’s case, the purpose is to instruct; in Morrison’s, however, it is to reinhabit the lives of those previously overlooked. Notwithstanding the similarity of their subject matter, the two texts are strikingly different insofar as Tocqueville’s presentation gives no room for the voices and perspectives of the victims of injustice. Nor does his fatalistic narrative suggest the possibility of concrete alternatives to these histories. Taken together, these two works raise broader questions about the sufficiency of fiction as a way of identifying and resolving dilemmas of race and exclusion in American society. In contrast to the inadequacy of Tocqueville’s “new science of politics,” Morrison seeks to project through her fiction a new world that points her readers toward novel ways of conceiving of freedom.