At first sight, it may seem to be counterintuitive to relate questions of aesthetics and form to political literature. After all, the very aim of political literature seems to be to prompt readers to reflect on, and either accept or reject, a political idea, measure, programme or ideology. In this sense, a political novel would be opposed to notions of aesthetics promoted since the turn of the eighteenth century: Autonomy, polyvalence, complexity, and the possibility of interpreting works of literature in many different ways run counter to political literature in the narrow sense. As Toni Morrison puts it, for many people “political fiction is not art”. According to Virginia Woolf, any kind of what she called ‘preaching’, any kind of teaching readers to believe in one particular notion, voiced by the authorial authority of someone who knows best, is opposed to fiction and should not be tolerated by common readers. Anyone who wanted to take a stand against fascism, for instance, should resort to factual genres—as she did when she published her pamphlet Three Guineas (1938).