Is it fair to say that (U.S.) intellectual historians have seldom paid much attention to the “novel of ideas?” Fiction—not to mention poetry—exists outside the universe of the Hollinger/Capper anthology.[1] Or rather it exists only as a kind of reference, in essays like Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses” and James Baldwin’s “Everyone’s Protest Novel.” Few intellectual historians deal directly and naturally with fiction as if it contained the same kind of raw material—words and notions, images and visions—as, say, a sermon.

I’m not pointing this out to dissent, necessarily; in some ways, I think the lack of interest means that there is a salutary lack of tradition to contend with—a problem that our colleagues in English departments and even American Studies departments still can’t shrug off, lo these many years after the canon wars commenced. Where the “novel of ideas” may, for an English prof, convey a very specific image and a constricting set of names and exemplars, for intellectual historians the category is rather empty, like a mansion built but never occupied.

That emptiness is promising at a time when more attention is rightly and belatedly being paid to the question of whose story gets to be heard. Rebecca Solnit’s recent “On the Myth of a ‘Real America’” is right now foremost in my mind, but this is a question that recurs time and again as writers grapple with the meaning of the #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite movements in Hollywood storytelling and as journalism reckons with the way that sexual harassment and implicit bias has shaped not only journalists’ workplaces, but their stories as well. As Solnit writes, “one of the battles of our time is about who the story is about, who matters and who decides.”

In many ways, I think that we at this blog and many other intellectual historians—and historians in general—have been entrenched for some time on the battlefield to which Solnit refers: the questions of “who the story is about, who matters and who decides” have been the daily portion of our work, the soul of our strivings. Intellectual historians certainly have no corner on those questions—and perhaps nothing truly novel to contribute.

But in addition to those three questions, one of the key dimensions in this battle is “whose taste is to be satisfied?” And here is where I wonder if intellectual historians do have a kind of occupational advantage.

An essay like this, by UK don Sarah Churchwell, describes very well the conditions which obtain in world of letters. If the Age of the Great Male Novelists (Roth, Mailer, Bellow, Updike…) is at an end, the question of how to clean up their toxic masculinity will consume a great deal of literary scholars’ and critics’ energies for the foreseeable future. Does one still write about them? How is one to write a history of postwar literature without them?

But an even thornier problem exists within English departments and among literary critics, I think: the Great Male Novelists shaped the tastes of a couple of generations of literary scholars. Bellow, Roth, & Co. were the standards of muscularly intellectual writing: if Rabbit, Run was not a novel of ideas, it was a novel written by a very smart man. The braininess of novelists and the intellectual quotient of novels ever since the 1950s has been measured by the yardstick of these men—at least for those who make the rating of such things their business, that is, literary scholars, literary critics, and novelists themselves.

To put the matter plainly: I think it is going to be very difficult for people who have primarily studied literature as their main subject to extricate themselves from the legacy of that long disciplinary embrace with the Great Male Novelists. There is a kind of inertia built in to all aspects of academia, and that is especially true here.

But that may not be true of intellectual historians: there may be an opportunity here—precisely because there is so little writing by intellectual historians on fiction—to do very interesting work on the intellectual (as opposed to the purely aesthetic or formal) content of the novel. We can define the novel of ideas not according to an inherited standard of, say, Augie March or White Noise, but according to standards we can more actively and conscientiously define. There is an opportunity, I think, to bring a freshness and inclusivity to the study of the novel.

So, if you’ve made it this far, I’d like to ask you—especially with summer on the horizon—what novels will you as intellectual historians (inside or outside of academia) be reading? Some of my own suggestions are in the comments.