Anti-Fascist Novel in Britain 1923–2023
Product details
- ISBN 9781041269168
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 10 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This book explores the anti-fascist novel in Britain: its origins in activists' experience, its solutions to questions of how to organise.
Some of the works Renton discusses are classics of twentieth-century literature including Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. Some are or were best-sellers – including Len Deighton’s SS-GB. The novels share certain themes: a central character is radicalised towards fascism and that decision shapes the protagonist’s life for the worse. Alternatively, in a mirror version of the same pattern, a protagonist becomes an anti-fascist and seeks to improve the world around them. Renton explains the real-life history that these novels reflect and the committed anti-fascist politics with which they engage.
This book will be of interest to researchers of antifascism, and social, cultural, and political history.
D. K. Renton is a British historian and barrister. His other books include Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism (Routledge, 2023), Labour’s Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong and How to Learn From It (Routledge 2022), No Free Speech for Fascists: Exploring ‘No Platform’ in History, Law and Politics (Routledge 2021) and Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League 1976–1982 (Routledge 2019).
