2026년 11월 12일 목요일

Friday essay: to tackle the dreadful rise in antisemitism, we must speak the truth about Israel’s war crimes

Friday essay: to tackle the dreadful rise in antisemitism, we must speak the truth about Israel’s war crimes

Friday essay: to tackle the dreadful rise in antisemitism, we must speak the truth about Israel’s war crimes
Published: November 13, 2026 


Over the past weeks I have watched with interest the ways, following the horrific Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 Israelis on October 7 2023, prominent Jews with a connection to Australia have justified, in response, the killing by the Israel Defence Forces, or IDF, of around 75,000 Gazan Palestinians, the majority of whom were innocent civilians, or more than 20,000 babies or children.

Recently, the British historian, Lord Andrew Roberts, was interviewed by Geraldine Doogue on the ABC Radio National program Global Roaming. According to Lord Roberts, the massacre of the Israeli Jews by Hamas and Islamic Jihad was an unspeakable moral crime, while the killing by the IDF of perhaps 40 or 50 times as many innocent Palestinians, was the kind of thing that, alas, happens in fighting a just war.

Even the propaganda department of the IDF has barely challenged the estimates of the numbers of civilian deaths. However, without pointing to any evidence, Roberts claimed the number of innocent Palestinians massacred by the IDF had been greatly exaggerated.

What was more interesting, however, was Roberts’ contrast between the killing of the Jews and Palestinians since the massacre of October 7. According to Roberts, the October 7 Hamas killers were in a “frenzy”. The things they did were “foul”, “vicious” and “disgusting”, resembling the accounts of warfare during “medieval” times and in recent history of the Japanese at “the rape of Nanking”. With “civilised countries”, this kind of “frenzied killing” did not take place.

In Gaza, the IDF’s killings were “totally different you see”. He said:


At no point did the Israelis look into the eyes of Palestinians and murder their children after torturing and raping them […] It’s an entirely different kind of warfare. You get tanks of course and aeroplanes […] Also of course you’ve got to kill as many terrorists as possible […] They [Hamas] also don’t care how many of their population die. In fact, in terms of public relations the more that die the better […] As an historian I try to stay rational and logical […] I see a totally different thing between the face-to-face massacre after torture and rape of Israelis on the 7th of October and the warfare that took place in Gaza between the IDF and Hamas.

Your support is what keeps us going.Yes, I can help

The IDF’s post-October 7 destruction in Gaza involved anything but conventional warfare. Anyone who has followed the Israeli campaign knows the Palestinians were killed according to an AI program called “Lavender”. It was first revealed in an article in the 972 Magazine on April 3 2024, written by Yuval Abraham, one of the filmmakers of the documentary NAZA.

When NAZA was shown at the Venice Film Festival, the applause lasted for 24 minutes. Israel had complete control of the air. The number of Palestinians who could be taken out as “collateral damage” – 20, 50, even 100 – depended on the seniority of the member of Hamas the IDF intelligence believed was sleeping in the same building.

If Roberts had thought for five minutes about his black-and-white contrast between the Hamas killing of Israelis and the IDF killings of Palestinians in the most recent war in Gaza, it might have occurred to him that in the Holocaust, which Roberts almost certainly would regard as the darkest crime in the history of humankind, the Germans did not kill most of the six million Jews in a “frenzy” or in “face-to-face” combat".

Eventually, the SS leadership recognised the most efficient and orderly method of exterminating the Jews was with deception. Vast numbers of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were led naked into the gas chambers of the extermination camps, believing they were about to be showered. (Or in the case of my maternal grandfather, into a sealed truck in Chelmno.)

Does Roberts believe this was a more civilised way of killing Jews than, for example, the often frenzied face-to-face pogroms that broke out during the Russian Civil War, where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered?

Any judgement about the comparative morality of Hamas’ frenzied, hate-filled killing of Jews on October 7 and Israel’s nonchalant, formulaic, algorithmic killing of innocent Palestinians in response, is to my mind dauntingly difficult. Not so, apparently, for Lord Roberts.
Judging the comparative morality of Hamas’ killing of Jews on October 7 and Israel’s killing of innocent Palestinians in response is ‘daunting difficult’. Dean Lewins/AAP
‘Jew hatred’ and genocide

In late October, Schwartz Media, owned by Morry Schwartz, published a Jewish Quarterly essay (edited by Jonathan Pearlman), Jew-Hatred: The Latest Episode, by the distinguished British historian, Sir Simon Schama. One of Schama’s contentions is that the claim the IDF has committed genocide against the Palestinians is “the most consequential” contemporary expression of millennia-old Jew-hatred.

Almost everything Schama says about the crime of genocide is false.

According to Schama, genocide is “the organised, systematic extermination of an entire population; a Wannsee-type, planned mass murder”. Schama seems not to recognise that largely because of the passionate political struggle of Raphael Lemkin, in 1948, genocide became a crime under international law.

When an international court will decide whether or not Israel is guilty of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, it will do so not according to Schama’s Holocaust-inflected private definition, but according to law – the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The Convention outlines what the International Commission of Jurists describes as “five specific underlying acts, any one of which may be constitutive of the crime of genocide”.

These are: “killing members of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”; “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”; “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; "imposing measures to prevent births within the group”; or “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”.
Historian Simon Schama calls the claim the IDF has committed genocide against Palestinians an expression of millennia-old Jew-hatred. Jehad Alshrafi/AAP

When the genocide case is heard before an international court, one of the most important questions will be Israel’s intent. Here is all Schama says on this vital question about Israel’s arguably genocidal post October 7 massacres.


Did Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, not call Palestinians “human animals” and wish out loud for their extermination?


No, he did not. On 9 October 2023, as details of unspeakable atrocities were becoming known, Gallant used the phrase when speaking of the Hamas terrorists who had planned and executed the horrific massacre, whose power — and if necessary whose lives — he wished to see ended. Therein lies the difference between war and genocide.


What Gallant actually said was quite different:


I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.

Under conditions of total siege, the principal victims will, of course, be the civilian population of Gaza. Without food and water, everyone suffers, eventually everyone dies. The Gazan Palestinians, not just the Hamas terrorists, are Gallant’s “human animals”. One day later, to underline the point, Gallant promised: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” Not Hamas; everything.

More importantly, as all those who write about the events in Gaza should know, when South Africa outlined its case to the International Court of Justice about Israel’s commission of genocide, it devoted nine tight, carefully footnoted pages to the question of Israel’s genocidal intent regarding the Palestinians in Gaza. What follows is a small sample.

Time and again, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the coming battle between the Jews and the Palestinians as a war between light and darkness, civilisation and barbarism, good and evil. As Israel prepared for its ground invasion, Netanyahu called upon Israeli troops to “remember Amalek”. In the Torah, as the invasion of Amalek territory begins, the Jews are commanded by God: “Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu often described the coming battle between the Jews and the Palestinians as a war between civilisation and barbarism, good and evil. Ohad Zwigenberg/AAP

On October 12, the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, made clear that “the entire nation” of the Gazan Palestinians was responsible for what occurred on October 7. And that the nation’s “backbone” must be “broken” as a result.

Three days earlier, the Coordinator of Government Activity in the Territories, Major General Ghassan Alian, had warned: “Human animals are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, no electricity, no water […] You wanted hell, you will get hell.”

On October 11, Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old veteran of the notorious and brutal 1948 massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin, was wheeled out. He broadcast on social media: “Erase the memory of them [the Gazan Palestinians]. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.”

On October 13, the Minister for Energy and Infrastructure, Israel Katz, tweeted: “All the civilian population in Gaza […] will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”

On November 1, the Minister for Heritage, Amichai Eliyahu, described the north of Gaza as “more beautiful than ever. Everything is blown up and flattened, simply a pleasure for the eyes.”

On November 11, the Minister for Agriculture, Avi Dichter, described what was happening as “the Gaza Nakba”. Nakba, the catastrophe, is the Palestinian name for the killings and the expulsions of 700,000 Palestinians at the time of the Arab–Jewish War of 1948.

On December 25, a former Knesset member was reported thus: “I tell you, in Gaza without exception, they are all terrorists, sons of dogs. They must be exterminated, all of them killed.”
A former Knesset member reportedly said: ‘in Gaza without exception, they are all terrorists, sons of dogs. They must be exterminated, all of them killed.’ Jehad Alshrafi/AAP

I hope not to be misunderstood. I have no idea whether the evidence collected by the South Africans or by others will eventually convince an international court of Israel’s commission of genocide in Gaza. I do know, however, that Schama’s suggestion that the “human animals” remark of Yoav Gallant was restricted to Hamas terrorists and did not involve the entire Palestinian population in Gaza, and that it was the sole or principal piece of evidence of Israeli post October 7 genocidal intent, are both false.

Towards the end of his essay, Schama writes:


So, for all the chants, this paroxysm of rage is, at its psychological core, not about Palestine, Israel or even the Jews. The hatred is about the haters: a failure of self-recognition: a displacement of the obligation to make amends. The Nazification of Israel […] act[s] as a reprieve from failing to do much about saving the Jewish victims even after the facts of their annihilation [in the Holocaust] were known. Likewise framing the Jews as history’s paradigmatic imperialist oppressors spares the descendants of actual colonisers from too much critical self-examination. Put the Jews in the dock rather than your great-grandparents.

I do not know how much Schama knows about Australia. However, the idea that the group Schama calls “white progressives”, including Australians, are trying to hide the guilt they ought to feel about the Indigenous dispossession in Australia, by defaming Israel for its supposedly genocidal campaign in Gaza, is about as comprehensive a misunderstanding of the politics of Gaza in this country as it is possible to imagine.

Schama argues, repeatedly, that those who accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza know nothing of the Holocaust. I am not sure how he can also, absurdly and contradicting himself, claim the genocide accusers are displacing onto Israel the guilt they ought to feel about their country’s failure to save the Jews during the Holocaust, of whose history they are supposedly ignorant.

More importantly, the hundreds of thousands of Australians who have demonstrated for the Gazan Palestinians – for the murdered, the wounded, the surviving two million whose lives lie in ruins – are overwhelmingly the same people who lead the struggle in Australia for Indigenous rights and the recognition of the tragedy of Indigenous dispossession.

At the very head of those who march and chant for the Palestinians against what they believe to be Israel’s genocide in Gaza are Australia’s younger Indigenous leaders.

At the conclusion of his denigration of the people who have reacted with appropriate horror at Israel’s pitiless destruction of Gaza, Schama thinks he can still speak with kindness, even intimacy, to the Palestinian people. “[S]hould we, Jews and non-Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, fail to listen to each other with respectful attention, informed by the truth, the unhappy victims of such deafness will, in the end, be all of us.”

A better title for Jew-Hatred would be Chutzpah.
Jillian Segal’s ‘astonishing overreach’

In October, Jillian Segal AO, Australia’s special envoy to combat antisemitism, published her progress report into the curse of rising antisemitism in Australia. The content has been expertly summarised in Deepcut News by Jeffrey Loewenstein, a former chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission in Australia.

“If Segal has her way, nearly every facet of life in Australia would, in effect, be subject to vetting by a cohort of pro-Israel supporters who wish for us to be muzzled as Israel carries out the worst crimes imaginable,” he wrote.

“The unelected Segal wants to reshape the arts, vet our public broadcasters, oversee the use of venues, stages, art spaces, what festivals should and should not be doing, revise our visa programs, sit atop digital governance and online regulation and tell universities how to conduct themselves. The gall of the overreach is extraordinary and yet mainstream media freely aired Segal’s report and arguments with barely a care for its implications on Australian democracy.”
Jillian Segal leaving the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. Sarah Wilson/AAP

Beyond this astonishing overreach, what emerges from Segal is an even more alarming dimension of her progress report.

On 14 occasions, Segal recommends the adoption throughout Australian institutions of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. The reason seems clear. Despite acknowledging not every criticism of Israel or its government is antisemitic, time and again the IHRA definition links criticism of Israel and antisemitism.

According to IHRA, it is antisemitic to claim that Israel exaggerates the Holocaust. It is antisemitic to accuse Jews of being more loyal to Israel than to their own homelands. It is antisemitic to deny Jews their right to self-determination or to describe Israel “as a racist endeavour”. It is antisemitic to compare Israel’s policies to those of the Nazis. And it is antisemitic to hold Jews in the diaspora responsible for Israel’s actions.

Under the IHRA definition, everyone in Australia who criticises Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank, or the diaspora for its uncritical support of those policies, will have to be very careful they have not strayed into territory the IHRA definition has forbidden and become vulnerable to the charge of antisemitism.

An addition to the Segal agenda in her recent progress report is the claim the most important camp of antisemitism in Australia is to be found among left-wing progressives:


Modern, progressive antisemitism is the most pervasive manifestation of antisemitism facing Australia today […] Modern progressive antisemitism has grown out of, and is especially prevalent in, some institutions of intellectual and cultural leadership, including universities, media, arts organisations and human rights NGOs […] The claims that Israel has committed humanity’s worst crimes — including genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid — allow for the depiction of anyone who associates or aligns with Israel as complicit in its purported evil.

As it happens, Segal has supplied us, by implication, with plentiful examples of what she takes to be modern, progressive antisemitism in Australia and elsewhere.

According to Segal, anyone who claims Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, as do very many international human rights bodies and genocide scholars, is an antisemite. According to Segal, anyone who believes it is almost self-evident that by destroying the houses, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, cultural sites, agricultural lands, etc., Israel has been conducting a ruthless policy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, thwarted only by the failure of Israel to find a country willing to take the two million survivors, is an antisemite.

According to Segal, anyone who argues that by turning a blind eye to the daily attacks on the Palestinian villagers by the Jewish settlers, Israel has begun upon a policy of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, is an antisemite. And according to Segal, anyone who argues the combination of liberal and democratic rights for the citizens of Israel and the suppression of those rights for the Palestinians in the West Bank (and now also most of Gaza) resembles the former system of apartheid in South Africa, is an antisemite.

By labelling as antisemitism the opinions of a goodly part of the Australian left, and beyond that the politically informed public, the Segal report represents the most insidious attack on political free speech in the recent history of Australia.
A lone protestor outside the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion in Melbourne. Christopher Hopkins/AAP
Asking to be left alone

Throughout my life, I have been preoccupied by the evil of antisemitism. One of my books, The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust, was about Helen “Demidenko’s” celebrated novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper. The novel revived the key Nazi concept that drove the Holocaust: Bolshevism and Stalinism as the expression of Jewish political power.

Another of my books, The Mind of the Islamic State, analysed the vicious antisemitism of ISIS. Accordingly, there is one eloquent passage in Schama with which I wholeheartedly agree:


Honestly, all we are asking for is to be left alone, to be able to send our children and grandchildren to a Jewish school in their uniforms, maybe with a kippah on their heads, without their being screamed at and being made to feel frightened and ashamed; to be able to ride public transport without being spat at or assaulted; to go to synagogue without having to pass through protective men with guns …

Schama believes he can help combat the rise of antisemitism in the diaspora by defending the indefensible: the war crimes of the IDF under Benjamin Netanyahu.

I believe a more likely remedy would be for leading diaspora thinkers, like Schama, and influential publishers, like Morry Schwartz, and the leaders in Australia of the principal Israel and Jewish lobbies, like Jillian Segal, to speak the truth about what, under Netanyahu and the two Kahanist-fascist members of his Government, Israel has become.

And about the moral revolution that has to happen in Israel if Jews in the diaspora are to be spared from the dreadful rise of antisemitism that is spreading around the Western world.

This is an edited version of an article originally published on Robert Manne’s Substack.

2026년 11월 10일 화요일

Social novel - Wikipedia

Social novel - Wikipedia


Social novel

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The social novel, also known as the social problem (or social protest) novel, is a "work of fiction in which a prevailing social problem, such as gender, race, or class prejudice, is dramatized through its effect on the characters of a novel".[1] More specific examples of social problems that are addressed in such works include poverty, conditions in factories and mines, the plight of child labor, violence against women, rising criminality, and epidemics because of over-crowding and poor sanitation in cities.[2]

Terms like thesis novel, propaganda novel, industrial novel, working-class novel and problem novel are also used to describe this type of novel;[3] a recent development in this genre is the young adult problem novel. It is also referred to as the sociological novel. The social protest novel is a form of social novel which places an emphasis on the idea of social change, while the proletarian novel is a political form of the social protest novel which may emphasize revolution.[4] While early examples are found in 18th century Britain, social novels have been written throughout Europe and the United States.

Britain

Manchester, England ("Cottonopolis"), pictured in 1840, showing the mass of factory chimneys

Although this subgenre of the novel is usually seen as having its origins in the 19th century, there were precursors in the 18th century, like Amelia by Henry Fielding (1751), Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) by William Godwin, The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794–1797) by Thomas Holcroft, and Nature and Art (1796) by Elizabeth Inchbald.[5] However, whereas Inchbald laid responsibility for social problems with the depravity and corruption of individuals, Godwin, in Caleb Williams, saw society's corruption as insurmountable.[6]

In England during the 1830s and 1840s the social novel "arose out of the social and political upheavals which followed the Reform Act 1832".[7] This was in many ways a reaction to rapid industrialization, and the social, political and economic issues associated with it, and was a means of commenting on abuses of government and industry and the suffering of the poor, who were not profiting from England's economic prosperity. These works were directed at the middle class to help create sympathy and promote change.

The social novel is also referred to as the "Condition-of-England novel". The term derives from the "Condition-of-England Question", which was first raised by Thomas Carlyle in Chartism (1839) and expanded upon in Past and Present (1843) and Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850).[8] The Chartist movement was a working-class political reformist movement that sought universal male suffrage and other parliamentary reforms. Chartism failed as a parliamentary movement; however, five of the "Six Points" of Chartism would become a reality within a century of the group's formation. "Condition-of-England novels sought to engage directly with the contemporary social and political issues with a focus on the representation of class, gender, and labour relations, as well as on social unrest and the growing antagonism between the rich and the poor in England". Authors wrote in response to Carlyle's warning that "if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody."[9]

A significant early example of this genre is Sybil, or The Two Nations, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli. Published in the same year, 1845, as Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Sybil traces the plight of the working classes of England. Disraeli was interested in dealing with the horrific conditions in which the majority of England's working classes lived. The book is a roman à thèse, a novel with a thesis, which aimed to create a furor over the squalor that was plaguing England's working class cities. Disraeli's interest in this subject stemmed from his interest in the Chartist movement.

Another early example of the social novel is Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1849), a work that set out to expose the social injustice suffered by workers in the clothing trade as well as the trials and tribulations of agricultural labourers. It also gives an insight into the Chartist campaign with which Kingsley was involved in the 1840s.

Elizabeth Gaskell's first industrial novel Mary Barton (1848) deals with relations between employers and workers, but its narrative adopted the view of the working poor and describes the "misery and hateful passions caused by the love of pursuing wealth as well as the egoism, thoughtlessness and insensitivity of manufacturers".[10] In North and South (1854–55), her second industrial, or social novel, Gaskell returns to the precarious situation of workers and their relations with industrialists, focusing more on the thinking and perspective of the employers.[11] Shirley (1849), Charlotte Brontë's second published novel after Jane Eyre, is also a social novel. Set in Yorkshire in the period 1811–12, during the industrial depression resulting from the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812, the action in Shirley takes place against a backdrop of the Luddite uprisings in the Yorkshire textile industry.

Social problems are also an important concern in the novels of Charles Dickens, including in particular poverty and the unhealthy living conditions associated with it, the exploitation of ordinary people by money lenders, the corruption and incompetence of the legal system, as well as of the administration of the Poor Law. Dickens was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. In a New York address, he expressed his belief that, "Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen."[12] Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime: it destroyed middle class polemics about criminals, making any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed impossible.[13][14]: 147  Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854) is set in a small Midlands industrial town. It particularly criticizes the effect of Utilitarianism on the lives of the working classes in cities. John Ruskin declared Hard Times to be his favourite Dickens work due to its exploration of important social questions. Walter Allen characterised Hard Times as being an unsurpassed "critique of industrial society", though later superseded by works of D. H. Lawrence. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together".[15]: 155  On the other hand, George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens, wrote, "There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as 'human nature'."[16]

Continental Europe

Arguably, Victor Hugo's 1862 work Les Misérables was the most significant social protest novel of the 19th century in Europe. His work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. Upton Sinclair described the novel as "one of the half-dozen greatest novels of the world," and remarked that Hugo set forth the purpose of Les Misérables in the Preface:[17]

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.

Among other French writers, Émile Zola's realist fiction contained many social protest works, including L'Assommoir (1877), which deals with life in an urban slum; and Germinal (1885), which is about a coal miners' strike. In his work-notes for the latter novel, Zola described it as posing what was to be the next century's, "'the twentieth century's most important question', namely the conflict between the forces of modern Capitalism and the interests of the human beings necessary to its advance."[18] Both Hugo and Zola were politically engaged, and suffered exile due to their political positions.[19]

Russian author Leo Tolstoy championed reform for his own country, particularly in education. Tolstoy did not consider his most famous work, War and Peace, to be a novel (nor did he consider many of the great Russian fictions written at that time to be novels). This view becomes less surprising if one considers that Tolstoy was a novelist of the realist school who considered the novel to be a framework for the examination of social and political issues in nineteenth-century life.[20] War and Peace (which was to Tolstoy really an epic in prose) therefore did not qualify. Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his first novel.[21]

America

An early American example is Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). The terms "thesis novel" and "propaganda novel" are also used to describe it, because it is "strongly weighted to convert the reader to the author's stand" on the subject of slavery.[22] There is an apocryphal tale told that when Stowe met Abraham Lincoln in Washington in November 1862,[23] the president greeted her by saying, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."[24] Mark Twain's work Huckleberry Finn (1884) is another early American social protest novel. Much of modern scholarship of Huckleberry Finn has focused on its treatment of race. Many Twain scholars have argued that the book, by humanizing Jim and exposing the fallacies of the racist assumptions of slavery, is an attack on racism.[25] Others have argued that the book falls short on this score, especially in its depiction of Jim. According to Professor Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia, Twain was unable to fully rise above the stereotypes of Black people that white readers of his era expected and enjoyed, and therefore resorted to minstrel show-style comedy to provide humor at Jim's expense, and ended up confirming rather than challenging late-19th century racist stereotypes.[26]

John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath often is cited as the most successful social protest novel of the 20th century. Part of its impact stemmed from its passionate depiction of the plight of the poor, and in fact, many of Steinbeck's contemporaries attacked his social and political views. Bryan Cordyack writes, "Steinbeck was attacked as a propagandist and a socialist from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. The most fervent of these attacks came from the Associated Farmers of California; they were displeased with the book's depiction of California farmers' attitudes and conduct toward the migrants. They denounced the book as a 'pack of lies' and labeled it 'communist propaganda'.[27] Some accused Steinbeck of exaggerating camp conditions to make a political point. Steinbeck had visited the camps well before publication of the novel[28] and argued their inhumane nature destroyed the settlers' spirit. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt championed Steinbeck's book against his detractors, and helped bring about Congressional hearings on the conditions in migrant farmer camps that led to changes in federal labor law.[29]

Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle, based on the meatpacking industry in Chicago, was first published in serial form in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason from February 25, 1905 to November 4, 1905.[30] Sinclair had spent about six months investigating the Chicago meatpacking industry for Appeal to Reason, work which inspired his novel. Sinclair intended to "set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profit".[31] His descriptions of the unsanitary and inhumane conditions that workers suffered served to shock and galvanize readers. The writer Jack London called Sinclair's book "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery".[32] Domestic and foreign purchases of American meat fell by half.[33] The novel brought public support for Congressional legislation and government regulation of the industry, including passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.[34][35]

A more recent social novel is Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son. Wright's protest novel was an immediate best-seller, selling 250,000 hardcover copies within three weeks of its publication by the Book-of-the-Month Club on March 1, 1940. It was one of the earliest successful attempts to explain the racial divide in America in terms of the social conditions imposed on African-Americans by the dominant white society. It also made Wright the wealthiest Black writer of his time and established him as a spokesperson for African-American issues, and the "father of Black American literature." As Irving Howe said in his 1963 essay "Black Boys and Native Sons," "The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever. No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies [... and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear, and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture."[36] However, the book was criticized by some of Wright's fellow African-American writers. James Baldwin's 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel" dismissed Native Son as protest fiction, and therefore limited in its understanding of human character and its artistic value.[37]

James Baldwin's novels and plays fictionalize fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration of not only Blacks yet also of male homosexuals, depicting as well some internalized impediments to such individuals' quest for acceptance, namely in his second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956), written well before the equality of homosexuals was widely espoused in America.[38] Baldwin's best-known novel is his first, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).

Proletarian novel

The proletarian novel, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica comes out of the direct experience of working class life and "is essentially an intended device of revolution", while works by middle-class novelists, like William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) and Charles Dickens' Hard Times, though they are sympathetic to the hardships experienced by worker, "are more concerned with the imposition of reform from above than with revolution from within".[39] The Russian Maksim Gorky, is an example of a proletarian writer, however, in the Soviet Union the proletarian novel was doomed to disappear "in the form that Gorky knew, for it is the essence of the revolutionary novel to possess vitality and validity only when written under capitalist 'tyranny'".[40] But the proletarian novel has also been categorized without any emphasis on revolution, as a novel "about the working classes and working-class life; perhaps with the intention of making propaganda",[41] and this may reflect a difference between Russian, American and other traditions of working-class writing, with that of Britain (see below).

The United States has had a number of working-class, socialist authors, such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and John Dos Passos. London wrote from a socialist viewpoint, which is evident in his novel The Iron Heel. Neither a theorist nor an intellectual socialist, London's socialism grew out of his life experience. As London explained in his essay, "How I Became a Socialist",[42] his views were influenced by his experience with people at the bottom of the social pit. His optimism and individualism faded, and he vowed never to do more hard physical work than necessary. He wrote that his individualism was hammered out of him, and he was politically reborn. He often closed his letters "Yours for the Revolution."[43] During the 1930s and 1940s Michael Gold (1894–1967) (the pen-name of Jewish American writer Itzok Isaac Granich) was considered the pre-eminent author and editor of U.S. proletarian literature. A lifelong communist, Gold was a novelist and literary critic. His semi-autobiographical novel Jews without Money (1930) was a bestseller. Other American examples of the proletarian novel include Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth (1929), Robert Cantwell's Land of Plenty (1934), Albert Halper's The Foundry (1934) and Albert Maltz's The Underground Stream (1940); other writers include James T. Farrell, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur.

However, the British tradition of working class writing was not solely inspired by the Communist Party, as it also involved socialists and anarchists. Furthermore, writing about the British working-class writers, H Gustav Klaus, in The Socialist Novel: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition, as long ago as 1982, suggested that "the once current [term] 'proletarian' is, internationally, on the retreat, while the competing concepts of 'working class' and 'socialist' continue to command about equal adherence".[44] The word proletarian is sometimes, however, used to describe works about the working class by actual working class authors, to distinguish them from works by middle class authors, like Charles Dickens's Hard Times and Henry Green's Living.[45] Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole (1933) has been described as an "excellent example" of an English proletarian novel[46] It was written during the early 1930s as a response to the crisis of unemployment, which was being felt locally, nationally, and internationally. It is set in Hanky Park, an industrial slum in Salford, where Greenwood was born and brought up. The novel begins around the time of the General Strike of 1926, but its main action takes place in 1931.

Young adult problem novel

The young adult problem novel deals with an adolescent's first confrontation with a social, or personal problem.[47] The term was first used this way in the late 1960s with reference to contemporary works like The Outsiders, a coming-of-age novel by S. E. Hinton, first published in 1967. The adolescent problem novel is rather loosely defined. Rose Mary Honnold in The Teen Reader's Advisor defines them as dealing more with characters from lower-class families and their problems; and as using "grittier", more realistic language, including dialects, profanity, and poor grammar, when it fits the character and setting.

Hinton's The Outsiders and Paul Zindel's The Pigman (1968) are problem novels written specifically for teenagers. However, Sheila Egoff notes in Thursday's Child: Trends and Patterns in Contemporary Children's Literature that the Newbery Award-winning novel It's Like This, Cat (1963) by Emily Cheney Neville may have established "the problem novel formula". Go Ask Alice (1971) is an early example of the subgenre and is often considered an example of the negative aspects of the form (although the author is "Anonymous", it is largely or wholly the work of its purported editor, Beatrice Sparks). A more recent example is Adam Rapp's The Buffalo Tree (1997).

Other social novels

Robert Tressell banner

See also

Notes

  1. "social problem novel" in Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 04 Nov. 2012. .
  2. "Childers, JW (2001)"
  3. Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall,1996), pp. 412,487, 518-9; M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. (Fort Worth, TX, : Harcourt Brace,1999), p.193
  4. "Proletarian" in "novel." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 25 Apr. 2013. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/421071/novel.
  5. Mona Scheuermann, Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State State University Press, 1985).
  6. Scheuermann, Mona (1985). Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. Columbus, Ohio.: Ohio State State University Press. pp. 231–241. ISBN 0-8142-0403-1.
  7. Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature, ed.Marion Wynne-Davies. (New York: Prentice Hall,1990), p. 101.
  8. Wood, James, ed. (1907). "Carlyle, Thomas" . The Nuttall Encyclopædia. London and New York: Frederick Warne.
  9. "Condition-of-England Novels". victorianweb.org. Retrieved 2022-08-10.
  10. Alison Chapman, ed. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton and North and South. Duxford: Icon Books, 1999.
  11. Alison Chapman
  12. Ackroyd, Peter (1990). Dickens. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. p. 345. ISBN 978-1-85619-000-8. Archived from the original on 26 September 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  13. Raina, Badri (1986). Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-299-10610-2.
  14. Bodenheimer, Rosemarie (2011). "London in the Victorian Novel". In Manley, Lawrence (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London. Cambridge University Press. pp. 142–159. ISBN 978-0-521-72231-5. Archived from the original on 19 November 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2016.
  15. Kucich, John; Sadoff, Dianne F (2006). "Charles Dickens". In Kastan, David Scott (ed.). The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Volume. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press. pp. 154–164. ISBN 978-0-19-516921-8. Archived from the original on 19 November 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2016.
  16. Eliot, George. "Charles Dickens".
  17. Sinclair, Upton (1915). The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest. Charles Rivers Editors. ISBN 978-1-247-96345-7.
  18. Robert Lethbridge, "Introduction" to Germinal by Émile Zola, trans. Peter Collier. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.vii.
  19. Frey, John Andrew (1999). A Victor Hugo Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press; Brown, Frederick (1995). Zola: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  20. Tolstoy and the Development of Realism. G Lukacs. Marxists on Literature: An Anthology, London: Penguin, 1977
  21. Christian, R. F. (2015). Tolstoy’s Letters, Volume 1: 1828–1879. London: Faber & Faber. p. 261. ISBN 9780571324071. Retrieved 2024-12-08.
  22. "social problem novel." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition
  23. McFarland, Philip (2007). Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Grove Press. p. 163. ISBN 978-0-8021-4390-7.
  24. Bennett, William John (2006). America: From the Age of Discovery to a World at War, 1492-1914. Thomas Nelson Inc. p. 284. ISBN 978-1-59555-055-2.
  25. For exampleShelley Fisher Fishin (1997). Lighting out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
  26. Stephen Railton (1987). "Jim and Mark Twain: What Do Dey Stan' For?". The Virginia Quarterly Review. Retrieved April 12, 2012.
  27. Cordyack, Brian. "20th-Century American Bestsellers: John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath". Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Archived from the original on February 24, 2005. Retrieved February 18, 2007.
  28. Shillinglaw, Susan; Benson, Jackson J (February 2, 2002). "Of Men and Their Making: The Non-Fiction Of John Steinbeck". London: Penguin. Retrieved December 17, 2008.
  29. "The Grapes of Wrath". National Public Radio.
  30. "The Jungle". History News Network.
  31. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Dover Thrift Editions., General Editor Paul Negri; Editor of The Jungle, Joslyn T Pine. Note: pp. vii-viii
  32. "Upton Sinclair". The Historical Society of Southern California. Archived from the original on March 13, 2013.
  33. "Sinclair's 'The Jungle' Turns 100". PBS Newshour. 10 May 2006. Archived from the original on June 14, 2006. Retrieved 10 June 2010.
  34. Marcus, p. 131
  35. Bloom, Harold, ed. (2002). Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Infobase Publishing. p. 11.
  36. "Richard Wright's Life".
  37. Rampersad, Arnold (1993). Introduction to Native Son (the restored text established by The Library of America). Harper Perennial. xxii. ISBN 0-06-083756-X.
  38. Jean-François Gounardoo, Joseph J. Rodgers (1992). The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Greenwood Press. pp. 158, 148–200.
  39. "Proletarian" in "novel." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 25 Apr. 2013. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/421071/novel.
  40. "Proletarian" in "novel." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition.
  41. J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Criticism. (London: Penguin Books), 1999. p. 703.
  42. "War of the Classes: How I Became a Socialist". london.sonoma.edu. Archived from the original on 2006-09-06.
  43. See Labor (1994) p. 546 for one example, a letter from London to William E. Walling dated November 30, 1909.
  44. Brighton: Harvest Press, 1982, p.1.
  45. John Fordham, "'A Strange Field': Region and Class in the Novels of Harold Heslop" in Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. Kristin Bluemel. Published 2009 :Edinburgh University Press, note no.1, p.71.
  46. J. A Cuddon, p. 703.
  47. Nelms, Beth; Nelms, Ben; Horton, Linda (January 1985). "Young Adult Literature: A Brief but Troubled Season: Problems in YA Fiction". The English Journal. 74 (1): 92–95. doi:10.2307/816529. JSTOR 816529.
  48. Margaret Drabble, The Oxford Companion to English Literature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.584-5.
  49. Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, New York, Macmillan, 1969, pp. 294–95; Zygmunt Szweykowski, Twórczość Bolesława Prusa (The Art of Bolesław Prus), 2nd ed., Warsaw, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1972, pp. 130–51.
  50. Victorian Web
  51. Bolesław Prus, The Doll, translation by David Welsh, revised by Dariusz Tołczyk and Anna Zaranko, introduction by Stanisław Barańczak, Budapest, Central European University Press, 1996; Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, second edition, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 295–99.
  52. "DreiserWebSource - Sister Carrie". www.library.upenn.edu. Archived from the original on 2003-06-18.
  53. "Rereading: Howard Brenton on The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell", The Guardian, Saturday 5 February 2011.
  54. "John Dos Passos." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/169718/John-Dos-Passos>.Web. 28 Apr. 2013; Carr, Virginia Spencer (1984). Dos Passos: A Life. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
  55. Penniless Press: James T Farrell by Jim Burns retrieved April 28, 2013
  56. Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (4th ed.). (Princeton University Press, 1972).
  57. "1939 Book Awards Given by Critics: Elgin Groseclose's 'Ararat' is Picked ...", The New York Times, 1940-02-14, page 25. ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851–2007).
  58. Carol Polsgrove, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement. 9New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
  59. M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, p. 193.
  60. Gardner, Susan (1990). "A Story for This Place and Time: An Interview with Nadine Gordimer about Burger's Daughter". In Bazin, Nancy Topping; Seymour, Marilyn Dallman. Conversations with Nadine Gordimer. Univ. Press of Mississippi. pp. 161–175.

Further reading

  • Childers, Joseph W. "Industrial culture and the Victorian novel". In The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (David, Deirde, ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. (ISBN 0-521-64619-7)
  • Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985.
  • Haywood, Ian, Working-Class Fiction: from Chartism to "Trainspotting". Plymouth: Nortcote House, 1997.
  • Kenton, Edna (1916), "The Beginnings of the Problem Novel", in Maurice, Arthur Bartlett (ed.), The Bookman, vol. XLIII, New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, pp. 434–439
  • Kestner, Joseph A(1985) "Protest and reform: the British social narrative by women, 1827-1867" Blackwell Publishing.
  • Kettle, Arnold. "The Early Victorian Social-Problem Novel", in: Boris Ford, ed. The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. From Dickens to Hardy. (vol. 6). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990.
  • Klaus, H. Gustav, The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing. Brighton: Harvester, 1985. ISBN 0-7108-0631-0
  • Klaus, H. Gustav and Knight, Steven, eds. British Industrial Fictions. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000.
  • Lindner C. "Outside Looking In: Material Culture in Gaskell's Industrial Novels" Orbis Litterarum, Volume 55, Number 5, 1 October 2000, pp. 379–396(18)
  • Lukàcs, Georg. Studies in European Realism. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964.
  • Morris, Pam. "Imagining inclusive society in nineteenth-century novels: the code of sincerity in the public sphere" JHU Press, 2004.
  • Murphy, James F.: The Proletarian Moment. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Ill 1991.
  • Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen Forties. London: Oxford University Press, 1954.
  • Vargo, Gregory. "An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel." Cambridge University Press, 2018.
  • Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. New York, Columbia University Press, 1958.
  • York, R.A. "Strangers and Secrets: Communication in the Nineteenth-century Novel". Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1994.
Young adult problem fiction
  • Julia Eccleshare, "Teenage Fiction: Realism, romances, contemporary problem novels". In Peter Hunt, ed.. International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature. London: Routledge,1996, pp. 387–396.
  • Sheila Egoff, "The Problem Novel". In Shiela Egoff, ed. Only Connect: readings on children's literature (2nd ed.). Ontario: Oxford University Press; 1980, pp. 356–369, and "The Problem Novel". Thursday's Child: Trends and Patterns in Contemporary Children's Literature. Chicago: American Library Association, 1981.
  • Isaac Gilman, "Shutting the Window: The Loss of Innocence in Twentieth-Century Children's Literature". The Looking Glass, 9 (3), September 2005.
  • Alleen Pace Nilsen, "That Was Then ... This Is Now". School Library Journal, 40 (4): April 1994, pp. 62–70.