The Political Unconscious of Make-Believe: A Narrative Review of Fiction's Political and Ideological Function
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Fiction is ideology's most sophisticated vehicle precisely because it pretends not to be: the invented story asks to be read as neither true nor false, and in that ask performs its politics. This article presents a narrative review of the literature that theorized fiction's political and ideological function. The synthesis is organized around three themes: fiction as production, in which Macherey's theory of literary production, Eagleton's criticism and ideology, Williams's Marxism and literature, and Bakhtin's dialogic imagination analyzed the novel's form --- its heteroglossia, its silences, its categories --- as ideology's articulation in language; fiction and historical experience, in which Lukacs's historical novel, Jameson's political unconscious, Moretti's Bildungsroman, and Ricoeur's time and narrative traced the fictional forms --- realism, romance, the youth's formation plot --- through which history becomes experienceable and ideology becomes plot; and fiction's critical margins, in which Suvin's cognitive estrangement, Kumar's utopia and anti-utopia, Iser's act of reading, and Pavel's fictional worlds mapped the functions --- estrangement, counter-world, response --- through which the invented world judges the actual one. It is concluded that the literature converges on a double thesis: fiction is ideology's instrument and its workshop --- the form in which an age's ideology is articulated and, in the same act, made visible, negotiable, and escapable.
Authors: Revista, Zen, LITERATURE, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204767887