Pragmatic and Idealistic

Not the least of the many virtues of Michael Wilding’s Political Fictions is that it sets out its argument in a cogent way, stating its intellectual premises forthrightly and following them through with as little compromise as possible. This sort of ideological criticism (ideological, even though Wilding insists his judgments are primarily literary ones, and analyses the prose of the chosen novels closely) is rare in Australia. Here critics have mostly been content to proceed from a purely pragmatic basis – or, as the sympathetic would have it, have been content to be intelligent rather than ideological.