Article in the conference collection What is the Political Novel? Defining the Genre, published in June 2025 at Open Research Europe.
The paper examines the theoretical and methodological questions that arise from the feminist critical encounter with the genre of the political novel. On the one hand, a relatively small number of studies explicitly devoted to the political novel as a genre do not present a differentiated feminist perspective. On the other hand, since its beginnings in the late 1960s, feminist criticism has developed both its various readings and ideas of literature as inherently political. Feminist readings and ideas of politics are above all reflected in the treatment of nineteenth and twentieth century novels as privileged literary sources. While having the theoretical and methodological apparatus of these approaches in mind, and particularly those that defined political dimensions of literature in the manner of thematic criticism, we take a closer look at one of the most influential early feminist readings of political narrative prose – Shoshana Felman’s “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy” (1975). Using this example, we explore the possibilities of interpreting the political elements in political fiction and the usefulness of the feminist perspective on the politics of literature in general to rethink the genre of the political novel. Furthermore, we raise the issue of the feminist reading of the political novel in light of the most influential contemporary feminist conceptions of politics developed in the horizon of post-foundational political thought.
