Abstract
All fiction, we have agreed, is situated in a social context and focuses on the relationship between the individual and society. The same thing holds true of the drama. Though the genre has a long history behind it and abounds in excellent illustrative examples, the social novel, like the social drama, is difficult to define with precision.1 The same difficulty attends the attempt to define the political novel.2 The difficulty is compounded when we endeavor to deal with the more specialized form of the novel of social criticism. Perhaps better than a formal definition will be a close consideration of one specimen of that form, The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck.
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References
Warren French uses the term in a restrictive sense. “By’ social novel,’ I mean a work that is so related to some specific historical phenomena that a detailed knowledge of the historical situation is essential to a full understanding of the novel at the same time that the artist’s manipulation of his materials provides an understanding of why the historical events occurred.” Warren French, The Social Novel at the End of an Era. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966, p. 7. French takes up such “social novels” as The Grapes of Wrath, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Hamlet, and other works. Strangely enough, he omits a consideration of Dos Passos’ fiction.
See “The Idea of the Political Novel,” in Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel. New York: Horizon Press, Inc., 1957, pp. 15–24.
Warren French, John Steinbeck. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1961, p. 10.
Gabriel Vahanian propounds the thesis “that both literature and the Christian tradition, at least in its primitive and essential thrust, are iconoclastic.” Gabriel Vahanian, Wait Without Idols. New York: George Braziller, 1964, p. x.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. New York: The Modern Library, 1939, p. 45.
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1972). The Moral Commitment of John Steinbeck. In: Literature and Society. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4851-3_10
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