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