Forum for European Philosophy LSE Literary Festival discussion: Is There Life in the Novel of Ideas?

Is the ‘novel of ideas’ an outdated genre or are we witnessing its resurgence? What answers can it offer to twenty-first-century questions? In this panel three speakers will discuss examples of the ‘novel of ideas’ and assess the genre’s contemporary relevance.

Peter Boxall is Professor of English and Deputy Head of the School of English at the University of Sussex.  His research has focused on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in modernist and contemporary writing, and more recently on the longer history of the novel. He has written books on Samuel Beckett and Don DeLillo, and a wide ranging book on the contemporary novel, entitled Twenty-First-Century Fiction. He is currently writing a book entitled The Value of the Novel, for Cambridge University Press (due out in 2015), and in the early stages of a new project on the history of the novel, entitled The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life.

Jennie Erdal worked in literary publishing for many years as an editor and translator. At Quartet Books she managed the Russian list, and in the mid-eighties she started Quartet Encounters, an imprint that focused on literature in translation. For much of this time she was also the ghostwriter of a London publisher, who figured prominently in her subsequent memoir, Ghosting: A Double Life which became an international bestseller.  In 2012 she published The Missing Shade of Blue, which was longlisted for the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize. Jennie Erdal has appeared in Granta magazine and is a regular contributor of features and reviews for the arts pages of the Financial Times and other publications. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Dundee.

Andrew O’Hagan is one of his generation’s most exciting and most serious chroniclers of contemporary Britain. He has twice been nominated for the Man Booker Prize. His books include The Missing, The Atlantic Ocean, Our Fathers, Personality, Be Near Me and The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog. He was voted one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He is Editor at Large of the London Review of Books. His new novel The Illuminations will be published in February 2015.

Chair: Michael Caines (@michaelscaines) is an editor at the Times Literary Supplement.

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