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Synopsis
The Centre of Things is an historical and critical look at the role of fiction in British politics from the beginning of the age of "print capitalism" to the present, focusing particularly on successful novelist turned Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Harvie examines the "Disraelian" political novel, with parliament the stage about which the action revolves. He cites novels by John Galt, George Eliot, Trollope, H.G. Wells, and Joyce Cary, all whose work subjected parliament to the rigorous scrutiny of "civic virtue." Harvie relates the factors which made the political novel such a lure--for publisher and politician alike-- to changes in media and politics; as a literary critic he disentangles the complex web of allusion, the character and plotting which "fixed" the genre. The Centre of Things is scholarly, scornful, and witty, and the first treatment of its important subject for nearly seventy years. Treating the contemporary scene, it is also a sharp, destructive indictment of the self-deception of a complacent, incompetent political elite-- left and right--within a state whose overcentralized media and parliamentary "elective dictatorship" have brought it to the edge of collapse.