Abstract

Too often critics and proponents of Ayn Rand's work have overlooked her contribution to debates in the twentieth century over the role of the novel in an age of mass politics. Echoing many midcentury literary critics, Rand defended the novel as an essential tool in countering the ideological passions that had led to recent political terrors. But Rand abandoned the notion of the novel as merely a fictional representation of the world as it is and instead blended realism and romance to show the world as it should be, a revolutionary impulse that countered liberal understandings of the novel.