Irving Howe's classic investigation of the role of revolutionary ideas in fiction is here reprinted in a new paperback edition. In establishing the role of the political novel and tracing its growth into the twentieth century, Mr. Howe draws his examples from Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Dostoevsky's The Possessed, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, and Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. He also explains why American...