/lit/ - Literature

Conservative authors don't tend to write "literary fiction." The genre itself does not tend to lend itself to conservative values and outlooks because it is generally more "emotional" than "cerebral." Conservatives fair better in more cerebral genres such as satire. Most of your great satirists tend to lean to the right (or at least vociferously away from the left): Evelyn Waugh, Herman Wouk, Jane Austen, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Tom Wolfe, Thackery, Jonathan Swift, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (to a degree), etc.

It's tricky to label a "right wing" novel because "right wing" is hard to define. There are 100 shades of conservative, and conservatives argue among one another like cats and dogs; they love intellectual wrestling matches with one another. Do you mean "libertarian"? Well, then, Ayn Rand certainly comes to mind. Anti-communist? You've got Alexander Solzyhneitzhen. You've got George Orwell, but he was a socialist, which is usually considered leftist.

I disagree with the general agreement that novels should not have intellectual content. The novels that have impressed me the most deeply have all had philosophical content--The Brothers Karamazov, Middlemarch, The Fountainhead, Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World, etc.

But it is true that, in general, left leaning people are more likely to slip thier idealogy into music, film, literature, and indeed every day conversation than are right leaning people. So there may be many more right leaning novelists out there--you just don't know it because they don't make a point of it.


I think almost by defintion, it would be hard to write a great "conservative" novel. I mean that literally. The definition of conservative: "tending to oppose change. Traditional or restrained in style."

Well, if you reject almost all of the great satires...this might be true. The thing is, conservatives only oppose change when the left is not the status quo. And since the left is the status quo in the media and the arts and the academy...well, conservatives are gung ho about change. And they are happy to mock the changes that the left has brought in--thus the satire.