Revolutionary Subjects

“Seen, for once, from a radically global perspective, as Kohlmann allows us to see it, the bildungsroman reveals a genuinely radical counter-tradition. A source of much-needed cultural sustenance in hard times.”
—Bruce Robbins

“Everyone in novel studies needs to read this book! Kohlmann uncovers a counter-tradition to the traditional bildungsroman plot—the radical left bildungsroman—which is formally experimental and committed to the collective and transnational work of living and making worlds together. With bravura new readings of a vast range of novelists, from Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Nanni Balestrini to Ding Ling, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, and Doris Lessing, this is a magisterial work of criticism.”
—Caroline Levine, author of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis

“We are accustomed to viewing the Bildungsroman as the realm of bourgeois consciousness, by ignoring or neglecting its dialectic complement: a radical Bildungsroman that, from the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century, is shaped by class struggle, socialism, decolonization, and revolutions. Navigating masterfully between novels, philosophy, and politics, Benjamin Kohlmann leads us both to discover an unknown aesthetic continent and to reinterpret many loved left-wing writers. An admirable accomplishment in theory and literary criticism.”
—Enzo Traverso, author of Revolution: An Intellectual History