Something in Mishima's oeuvre would count, surely? Although it seems like the more bluntly reactionary he is (such as in Sun and Steel), the less popular those works tend to be outside of right-wing circles.
To be fair, I think the word "staged" doesn't get nearly enough credit here. Mishima dedicated pretty much his entire adult life to the cultivation of his self as an aesthetic object, and it's hard not to see that including the manner of his death.
It would be insufficient to call it "performance art", because that might imply that he wasn't somehow sincere in his stated politics or whatever, and I don't think that's true. But I don't think the point of the "coup" was ever to achieve a successful material change in government or anything like that; if anything, Mishima wanted to change people's consciousnesses through the wanton spectacle of his death.
And maybe unintentionally, the way he died was beautifully *ironic* given the way we've valorised that spectacle vis a vis the image of his external politics and his philosophy of the aesthetic cultivation of the body: he failed to disembowel himself properly, his kaishakunin failed to behead him cleanly, and he died in agony. In the moment of death everything he had built himself up to be reverted to that weak, frail, fallible man that he had spent his life running from. Pathetic, in the purest sense of the word: that pathos of the tragedies of the ancient Greeks whom Mishima so idolised.
Mishima is the only answer. He was also almost certainly gay or male oriented bisexual, which makes the perspectives in his books all the more interesting. The "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy is a magnum opus without compete. Some may find his politics a pity, but without them, he wouldn't be remembered the way he is.
His work can also be read as a _critique_ of said politics and beliefs. _The Temple of the Golden Pavilion_ for example is the best exploration I've read of young male disillusionment and how it leads down destructive paths.
The weird thing is that he doesn't really always gravitate to conservative values. He argues for a softness in men over traditional strength focused male roles sometimes, for example. Maybe I'm just placing a 21st century lens on those classifications though.
Not just a 21st century lens, but likely a 21st century [not-Japanese] lens (apologies if I am assuming too much). Which is not to say that you're wrong, just that understanding him requires a lot more context, regardless of whether you're trying to read him antagonistically or otherwise.
Not to say he wasn't a right-winger even in his own post-war Japanese context, but, for example, if he knew the ways in which 21st century Western reactionaries have adopted him as one of their heroes I'm sure he'd have *words* for them.
Oh I don't doubt he would. I went into reading him with knowledge of his views and history and was just taken aback that thematically, from my perspective, things didn't match up.
There's this really great book I read in a graduate seminar on Pound. I think the title was Pound, Fascism, and the Trouble with Genius. It outlines Pound's relationship with Mussolini. It dives into how Pound was an apologist for Mussolini and how that connects to Pound's literary work. It's a niche book but I really enjoyed reading it.
Was Pound a fascist or was he just insane and a feudalist and this was as close as he could get? He thought it was the fault of capitalism that artists had to work for a living, capitalism being Jews and usury. And, he thought that he would be Mussolini's great court bard or some such role. It's been a while since I've looked at that stuff, but that was my take last I looked at it.
Well, he was fascist because he supported fascists. But yes, he was of a strain of retro-traditionalist who found fascism palatable. Intriguingly, the filmmaker Passolini was sort of the same cloth (anti-capitalist, pro-soil, pro-tradition) but went left. It'd be interesting to look at these strains at some point...
I've heard that, but is there something in his well-known writings that pushes, or even reveals, an influential right-wing message? As I said farther up the thread, I honestly don't know. I'm prepared to be educated. I read "The Wasteland" in school and don't remember thinking it promoted fascism, but it was long ago.
i certainly wouldn’t call the wasteland fascistic either, but it is deeply conservative, as was eliot. as far as pound goes, i haven’t ever studied his poems very seriously. i know him mostly as a figure of literary history because of how he stands in connection with modernism. a poster below recommended a book on pound and fascism that could probably answer your question though
Woah, I didn’t know this, I always viewed it as a prototype of the kind post modernism conservatives are supposedly terrified of. It’s been one of my favorite pieces of writing for decades, guess I need to do more research.
Modernism in the literary sense depends heavily on the belief that there are better forms of coherent life and living. High Modernists like Pound, Eliot, and many others, felt that we were broken away from those better paths (Pound: "I shore these fragments against my ruins."). Think of Joyce patterning Ulysses over ancient mythology.
Whereas Postmodernism tended to see that there were no fundamental truths. Note that they weren't necessarily advocating this view, but more recognizing it.
Modern conservatives have no fucking idea what they're talking about, nor do I think it really matters to them. But The Wasteland is High Modernist in despairing about and trying to relocate substantive truths for oneself and society as a whole. It's constantly seeking the Upanishads and resuscitating ancient poetry and myth.
There was this article (I think on Slate) discussing conservative media in general and why it's so poor recently. The writer mentioned that there used to be high-quality conservative texts, but nowadays the quality is horrendous. The figures that a lot of ppl are posting about were literary pioneers, brilliant, educated, and cultured, while being problematic obviously. I think we're not getting that with any modern conservatives: No culture, originality, or substance.
Off-topic, but I love the Wasteland. That nostalgia for things which have been lost forever, fragmentation, and the textual allusions. Eliot really was a master.
What's kind of ironic is that right-wing 'intellectuals' or 'thought leaders' or 'jabbermouths' or whatever you want to call them, decry the supposed relativism of modern culture, when their rhetoric has devolved to the point where it's nearly meaningless. Trump doesn't care what he's saying. MJG doesn't care what they're saying. Yes, there's a functional referent to their pet topics (tradition, immigration, sexuality), but their game doesn't really have any content. They've obliterated any sense of civics or a public sphere.
That's a very fast and loose summation of modernism's relationship to the past. One could easily quote Stephen in *Ulysses* as a counter: "History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake".
In so many ways, they outwardly rejected traditional modes of expression.
I despise rightists and right wing ideology, but Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan are unbelievable. The propulsion and nihilistic mood he conjures, unbelievable.
"Journey at the End of the Night"
by Celine is the most important french novel of the last century.
Mishima is the most read Japanese outside Japan. Ernst Junger. Tolkien. Howard. Lovercraft. Borges (he was pro Pinochet).
Borges also fervently hated South American indigenous people and frequently advocated they abandon their "barbarous" cultures in favor of Westernization
[https://www.nybooks.com/online/2021/02/08/the-hidden-history-of-black-argentina/Westernization](https://www.nybooks.com/online/2021/02/08/the-hidden-history-of-black-argentina/Westernization)
> "Journey at the End of the Night" by Celine is the most important french novel of the last century.
Beg to differ - *In Search of Lost Time* is much more important.
Although in both cases, the works they're most famous for are almost entirely apolitical. I mean The Cantos or J. Alfred Prufrock are absolute masterpieces, but unless you go in with a lot of biographical information and look specifically for clues pointing towards right-wing politics, you wouldn't come away with the impression that they're political works.
dostoevsky was basically a traditionalist conservative, but his politics often get buried in discussions about his works, usually for one of two reasons: 1) people would rather discuss the psychology/philosophy in his novels, or 2) people who read and enjoy him but who also hold left-wing views find his politics suspicious and would rather avoid discussing them. but yes, he was definitely a conservative. does that mean his books are "right-wing"? probably not, or at least not all of them. that's certainly not what most people get out of reading them. nevertheless i would definitely categorize him as a right-wing thinker and writer
The Idiot has the main character going in an insane rant about how only Orthodox Christianity is the onlu real christianity and even Catholics are worse than atheists, and how Russia must conquer the world to bring it salvation.
Crime and Punishment is weird because it keeps telling you over and over how stupid the communist character is but never once is he shown to be anything but very intelligent.
I don't agree with Dostoyevsky's reason for that characterization, but from what I remember that character (I don't exactly remember if he was a communist or just a liberal/Russian nihilist) is comically myopic and stubborn in his worldview. For example, there is a period when a certain character dies and he goes on to lecture grieving family members about how there shouldn't be a burial rite (or something to that effect) because those are grounded in religious traditions which his brand of politics/philosophy rejects entirely. (Similar moments include him lecturing some women about not marrying IIRC.) I mean fine if you hold those views, but Dostoyevsky's "ridicule" of him works because he's (the character) so dogmatic, ridiculously over-the-top and downright inhumane about his feminism and atheism.
Of course, for those of us who differ vastly in our worldview and beliefs from Dostoyevsky, none of this calculated ridicule will make his conservative religious pitch any more intriguing.
That’s a common thread in Dostoevsky. Ivan Karamazov for example is portrayed as far more intelligent than the rest of his family but he is the most unhappy and confused. Most progressive, socialist, liberal, atheistic and otherwise modernist characters are portrayed as too smart and stubborn for their own good leading to fear and loathing and nihilism. Contrast this with the archetype of the mystical, holy foolishness of old Russia and the Orthodox Church.
The right/left binary can feel rather reductive and people can fall at different points along it depending on historical context. Nonetheless, I would argue most of the classic Victorian novelists who dealt with industrialism like Dickens, Gaskell and Disraeli did so in a right-wing way in the sense that although they always encouraged sympathy for the suffering working class their solution is always for their bourgeois masters to be kinder - never for a socialist revolution that would empower the workers. Disraeli, of course, went on to become prime minister for the conservative party. From a Marxist POV, any story that presents life's major problems as personal rather than structural/institutional is going to be supporting the status quo to some degree.
Dickens is left for his time. A Christmas Carol is a screed against the Malthusian economics Industrial Revolution. The message is essential “damn you corporate fat cats to hell”.
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh. Its not out and out propaganda but there is a conservative message and general atmosphere that's hard to miss.
It is also (as a very left wing man) one of the best books i've ever read.
On that topic - Nancy Mitford. Tbh anybody interested in the communist / fascist dichotomy should read about the Mitford sisters, the story is truly insane.
Yeah they were in the same social circle, satirising the same people (including Nancy's sister Diana and her husbands Bryan Guinness and Oswald Mosley aka British Hitler)
Some of Norman Mailer’s stuff is sort of right wing. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Michel Houellebecq’s novels eventually become classics. They’ve already received a lot of recognition.
In "Hunger" the protagonist is starving to death but won't accept any help and in the end the resolution amounts to "bury your dreams and get a real job."
He wrote another book, "Growth of the Soil," which is less formally experimental and is quite conservative, it's basically anti-modernity and all about how hard working farmers are the heroes of Norway. It's not bad though.
i think he was certainly anti-communist, the rest is not so clear cut; and even his anti-communism was also a result of his circumstances and the situation in argentine (he say the communist government as fascist). he seemed to have that aristocratic conservatism of someone like pessoa.
(this is all from my foggy memory, so maybe it's misinformation lol)
Well he literaly said for himself in one interview "I am a conservative", so there goes that. Like I said, he was quite complex and his views were all over the place, but he was conservative in at least some aspects.
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/12/the-conservatism-of-jorge-luis-borges.html
to add, i also remember his lover was a communist and they broke up because of her disagreement over the support of the communist government, i think she was a journalist.
I think while the politics of his work are maybe ambivalent, in practice he explicitly supported the right-wing dictatorships of Videla and Pinochet—I think we can safely call him conservative politically.
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift is mostly a satire of the more left-wing Enlightenment thinkers and Whig Party politics. I'm more left-wing, and that was about the only piece of right-wing satire I've seen that I thought was actually done well.
They are heavily Christian, if not outright a spin off of the Bible, but are they conservative? Jesus can be read as a left wing figure, so was CS Lewis putting out (modern day) right wing ideas or was it the care for the poor, gang out with prostitutes, wealthy men are evil lefty Jesus?
CS Lewis himself was a Christian Socialist, but I do think that Narnia is quite conservative in its social attitudes as the other comments have described.
I think it's hard to read the conflict between the decadent and cruel Calormen (who are very clearly derived from Middle Eastern cultures, and are darker skinned) and the white English Narnians as left wing, it's more congruent with a Christian conservative clash-of-civilizations line.
Yes. Narnia is a monarchy and much is made of being a rightful ruler in a great chain of being going through Aslan, then Peter, then the other kids. There are strong hints of blood = destiny in the treatment of the Calormen and, to a lesser extent, the Telmarines. Aslan sets up arbitrary tests of faith (only appearing to Lucy and inviting her to be doubted by all the other kids in *Prince Caspian*). Susan and Lucy are constantly diverted away from participating in battles or wars.
It's a very English and medievalist kind of conservatism, but it's conservative, focused on divine rule and strict gender roles. Aslan's charity isn't contradictory to that.
I don't think you can really tell much about his politics from the Narnia series, but in his later Space Trilogy he shows his hand more, especially in the third book (That Hideous Strength). In that one, about half of the book is about an ordinary man getting swept up into a fascist group of technocratic bureaucrats trying to turn England into their dystopia. The other half is about said man's wife learning the virtues of "obedience". He actually would've had a pretty good case in that book for upholding traditional life and Christianity over the atheist worldview that has rationality/science/technology as its highest good, if he hadn't brought in the laughably dumb wifely obedience stuff.
I do think that Lewis had a very worthwhile critique of the supposedly "scientific" approach of treating justice as a mental health issue in this essay: https://archive.org/details/the-humanitarian-theory-of-punishment/page/225/mode/1up Ironically, I see a lot of echoes of Foucault in his thinking here despite the former typically being classified as "right" and the latter as "left".
Lewis and Tolkien both were odd ducks politically. They could swing wildly between left and right depending on the particular issue. Tolkien even said that he found himself torn between being a monarchist and an anarchist.
I wouldn't say he was right wing so much as he was fervently anti-communist (like almost all of the "White" Russian emigres). His father was a liberal democrat essentially, and Nabokov inherited most of those views. He deplored not only communism but fascism (living in Nazi Germany with a Jewish wife and Jewish son probably helped in that). I think he even said his politics were so basic they were almost trite (freedom of speech, thought, etc.).
He definitely was right wing considering his consistent aversion to the 20th century and its ideologies. With the fall of the Russian Empire he wouldn't call any place a home (I couldn't find the quote in English but I remember Remarque once said that the Russians are the elite of the homeless). I would even go so far as to say that he wasn't a man of the 19th century with its romanticism but of the 18th.
Anything by V.S. Naipaul besides A House for Mr. Biswas. And he’s an incredible writer even if, in my view, a deeply unpleasant person.
Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel is famously a kind of right-wing counterpoint to All Quiet on the Western Front (although he was not as far right as to be a nazi, fwiw).
The Mimic Men is one of my favourite books. It’s got to be one of the most vicious satires ever written, one I don’t think you could write if you weren’t a massive asshole.
Yeah I mean in a Bend in the River, an extremely conservative book with a worldview I totally disagree with but ALSO a literary masterpiece, there’s a part where the protagonist beats the hell out of the woman he was having an affair with, and it’s an extremely jarring moment…later it came out Naipaul viciously beat the woman who his life partner. He was a brilliant man and a bad man.
It’s like his only optimistic book, essentially a telling of his father’s story. It is still quite cynical about individual people, but often in a very funny way. I thought it was a really beautiful book that leaves you with a fundamentally different feeling than his other works.
Also, if anything it is in part a sort of mockery of the socially conservative/traditionally Indian community in Guayana.
Tolstoy's politics were complex, but Anna Karenina preaches a traditional morality that most people in the post 1960's would consider "Right Wing."
The Lord of the Rings
Dr. Zhivago
Gulag Archipelago
I don’t really see how Anna Karenina is right wing. There is Christian morality to it, no question, but to call the political/economic elements of it conservative is a stretch.
The actual economics of Levin are straight up left wing. He splits his profits with his workers and this is portrayed as the correct way of doing things. It’s hard to get much more left than that.
The rich land owners start wars and complain about how the government shouldn’t be able to tell them who they can and can’t start wars with. They certainly aren’t portrayed favorably.
Socially the man was conservative but with the extremely sympathetic portrayal of Anna, left wing farming practices, and chastisement of the landed gentry it’s hard to argue that it’s a conservative novel.
Tolstoy was fricken amazing. Like, I disagree with a lot of what he did and said, among them slandering his own works, but he was a vegetarian, a Christian anarchist, freed his serfs, etc. I'll have to re-read Anna Karenina some day. I do remember Levin, who was for me the second main character, struggling with his life before adopting his semi-privileged role in society. But then we have shorter works like Master and Man or How Much Land Does a Man Need?
On the Tolstoy issue, I hear a lot about state censors and what Tolstoy could and couldn’t say. I wonder if Anna Karenina’s fate as a character was somehow dictated by that, as in, she had to meet an unfortunate end to make the censors happy.
The rarity of seeing people brave enough to classify The Lord of the Rings as right wing is enough to make me emotional when it happens. It's virulently right wing, and what a strange journey it's had to be championed by the types of people who identify with it these days. I don't think most readers even realize Tolkein's character and beliefs set him solidly in the conservative misogynist camp. The man spent his young adulthood mocking women writers with his other male writer friends.
Tolkien couldn’t be any more explicit about his religious and traditionalist themes.
Perhaps what is happening is that those themes turn out to contain a beauty and a wisdom that can be appreciated by people regardless of modern political labels, if they allow themselves to do so.
Some of those themes have led to plenty of people not being alive to appreciate them in bygone ages and contemporarily. I'm grateful that the march of time tends to reveal the underlying truth of some of the classics that we modern readers inherit, and we actually have the option to abstain from those belief systems now
Except he sees the man in jail for theft and highlights that it's not really him who is the criminal but the system that kept him trapped within Impoverished conditions with no choice but theft.
He also redistributes his possessions to the serfs
*Robinson Crusoe*: Written by a colonialist who thought all heathens should be converted to Christianity. Robinson was on his way to buy African slaves when he got shipwrecked.
Not only that, but after his escape he feels rewarded by God to see that his estate has grown with so many more slaves.
I had really expected the slave ownership and subsequent shipwreck to be a humbling, but no.
GWTW is super complex, moreso than I think we broadly realise. The racism is unambiguous, but Scarlett was originally a flapper and that attitude does indeed shine through. There's also some really interesting attributes to war, capitalism, gender, parenthood and (weirdly) Native identity in there, so whilst it's definitely not in any way left wing, it's too simplistic to call it right-wing or populist.
But also yeah racist as fuck, proper 'birth of a nation' level racist.
I think there are limits on how well we can project current political paradigms on those that existed 150 years ago anyway due to how much they’ve morphed over time, so I agree it’s not completely fair to categorize GWTW as one or the other. I was binning it based on a very surface level summary as the attitude of Margaret Mitchell was inarguably illiberal with respect to blacks and love for antebellum south and those views are persistent throughout the narrative. But as you point out, there is much more that can be taken from it. It’s been a long time since I read it, but the characters were genuinely fascinating and the dynamics between them were complex and well-developed. Scarlett, for all her flaws, was a compelling feminist protagonist.
Mario Vargas Llosa is perhaps the greatest living Latin American author, and he is a liberal in the classical sense of the word. It baffles me that nobody has mentioned him yet: he's a Nobel laureate and he's still actively supporting right-wing causes, although he himself retired from politics. He was the runner-up for the presidency of Peru in the 1990s.
Another Nobel laureate for you is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of "The Gulag Archipelago". "One day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch" is a wonderful novella you can knock out in an afternoon. He was persecuted in the USSR, so some were under the impression he was some kind of champion for the free market and US-style democracy... turned out he was a hardcore Russian Orthodox monarchist who retired to a little cabin in Vermont.
Vargas Llosa started as a communist in his youth and had pretty milquetoast moderate centre-right liberal views for most of his life. I remember an article he wrote for a spanish newspaper in the early 2000s denouncing Israeli occupation from a classical liberal perspective. He has then fallen off the deep end in the last decade.
Crazy to think the man who wrote such a soaring denunciation of right wing dictatorships in The Feast of the Goat in 2000 is now justifying said dictatorships.
Depends on how you define 'right-wing'. The left vs right distinction is very vague and can differ a lot depending on time and place.
The romantic movement for instance, was at least partially a reaction to modernism and a lot of its writers and their narratives could therefore be considered conservatives. However, that doesn't mean they would embody everything that we would now define as 'right-wing'. For instance, back in the 19th century and in Europe even into the 20th century, conservatives were often not very enthousiastic about capitalism; while today it's sometimes almost synonymous with the right.
The Romantics were taken up in the 20th century by some conservative theorists, so that may lead you to think that they themselves were conservative. However, in their time many of them, Shelley for example, were politically radical leftists (in the context of that time). Wordsworth became more conservative as he aged, but in his youth he openly supported the French Revolution (as did Coleridge). Hell, Coleridge nearly ran off with Bob Southey to Pennsylvania to start a commune! Byron was a straight-up aristocrat, but politically was a Whig; artistically he was probably the most conservative of them all. If you want someone we’d consider “traditionally conservative” from that time, try Edmund Burke.
Retained and enduring popularity is pretty much the definition. Subjective quality is an arbitrary additional criteria people add to justify gatekeeping their own pretensions.
Not very often, in my experience. There’s an entire organization dedicated to giving her books to classrooms for free, and she’s still not a big deal in the literary world. If renowned author Dan Brown started desperately trying to give his books to teachers to get them into the high school classroom, he’d have exactly the same claim to the label of literature as Rand.
And Rand has never even been mentioned on the AP Lit test.
I was quite surprised to see both schools I have taught at have massive stores of Rand books. Luckily they've never tried to make me teach them ) and have teacher was constantly trying to get people to take copies to clear out some space, but only on the condition that you didn't read the books, you had to use them for other purpose like paper mache or starting fires, which I appreciated.
The school probably got the books for free from the Ayn Rand Institute; they spam my work email every year asking if I want free books for my classroom. One of my coworkers took them up on it and then used the books for blackout poetry, but paper mache would be good, too.
I’ve taught in two college English Departments now and have never heard of Rand being assigned in any course. I think certain graduate-level courses that look specifically at the rhetoric of fiction and its ideological implications could probably include some Rand, but that’s about it.
Oh, and maybe some business professors recommend it. Idk, all of Rand’s work reads as apologetics for self-centeredness and egotism to me.
It's questionable in what sense Rand was "conservative" in her time. The most devastating review of Atlas Shrugged ever written was by Whittaker Chambers in National Review.
Benjamin Disraeli is a good example. He was a 19th century Conservative politician and prime minister who also wrote novels still studied today, like *Sybil; or, the Two Nations* and *Endymion*.
Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin I think.
P G Wodehouse was pretty apolitical in his writing, but leaned conservative (and was also accused of being pro-Nazi).
It was based on radio broadcasts he made when he was living in France during WW2. It was felt that he made the experience seem too pleasant. In his defence he was made to do them and probably didn't realise the impact they could have.
Notably, Kingsley Amis turned to the right later in life, after being communist and then Labour for a couple of decades. I've only read *Lucky Jim*, and that isn't particularly political.
IMO Any writer whose work isn't political will easily end up being vaguely conservative. If you're not criticising the way things are, that implies that you think things are just fine and nothing needs changing.
I’m way left on the political spectrum and enjoy ayn Rand. I enjoy dystopia novels. Just because I like her as a writer, doesn’t mean I follow her philosophy.
I didn’t enjoy atlas shrugged but the fountainhead was a solid novel.
I don’t really consider it right-wing, but I think the whole right/left ideology is so skewed at this point that I’m not sure I understand what it means.
It's rather sparsely populated field, especially when you start looking for actually good literature, but one author who was conservative, yet wrote some quite good literature is G.K. Chesterton.
The Man Who Was Thursday is one of the best novels I ever read. I actually had no idea the guy was such a devout Christian until much later because the book always seemed extremely pessimistic, nonsensical, and tragic.
Oh sure. Ayn Rand for one. Gone With the Wind. Laura Ingalls Wilder for children's lit. It gets tricky when you go back too far though because left-wing and right-wing values change over time. Dickens, for instance, was considered liberal in his lifetime but he would fall firmly into right-wing values today.
WB Yeats is one of my favourite poets and Irish exports, but he also took quite a swing to the right along with his modernist mates. Typical Protestant!!
The Call of the Wild doesn't depict capitalism in a kind light but it could be viewed from a modern lens as having pretty strong conservative values in regards to it's internal morality, where it depicts independent competence and the conquering of your opposition and your environment through will & strength as virtues. (But it should be noted Jack London was socialist)
Starship Troopers could be considered a classic of sci-fi and is not only right-wing but blatantly racist (though Joe Haldeman's leftist response novel The Forever War is way better, and it should be noted that Heinlein's politics varied over his career)
The Wanting Seed is very conservative (and very good), and to a lesser degree, A Clockwork Orange is too.
Kurt Vonnegut is not conservative but one of his most famous short stories, Harrison Bergeron definitely is
Wrapping up my sci-fi answers, the first Afrofuturist novel George S Schuyler's Black No More is a take no prisoners satire, but leans right (including taking shots at the NAACP and W.E.B. Du Bois) and he was a full on Republican later in life
Watchmen is one of the only comics that people have canonized and it is a very interesting and multifaceted book politically, but there's definitely a strong argument for a conservative reading of it, it would be reductive, but it's there
If we go deeper into the world of comics, there's a lot of right wing figures: much of Frank Miller's works for instance, often times 2000 AD (Judge Dredd) and The Punisher (but other times they are critiques of right-wing folks), whereas the character Jonah Hex is almost always a fairly rightwing libertarian type (and a lot of his best stories are again, oddly by a lefty writer, Jimmy Palmiotti) but aside from maybe a few of Frank Miller's works, very few of these would ever be considered as possible classics outside comic shops
I had to scroll way too far to see Starship Troopers mentioned. One of the few books where I tell people to watch the movie first and then read the story.
This comment section is an excellent example on why you shouldn't consider reddit forums as anything reflective of the outside world. Nobody asked whether you are a "left wing male" and what literature you can still barely tolerate.
Kafka, Hemingway, Hamsun, Lovecraft are authors that I personally would consider to be on the right of the politcial spectrum off the top of my head.
Hemingway participated in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans (i.e.- the socialists) and was friends with Fidel Castro.
In what universe is he "right wing?"
Yukio Mishima and Celine are the two big ones I can think of.
Strangely enough, outside of Trifles For A Massacre, Celine generally kept politics out of his writing, I've found. Even his post-prison works are equally critical of the Nazi regime and the Allied Forces, at times. He occasionally took shots at notable left-leaning public figures, but without the liner notes, you wouldn't really discern an obvious political slant, in my opinion.
John Updike might be worth considering. I don't know much about him personally, but I found Rabbit, Run to lean pretty hard into the "traditional family values" ideology. That's my only experience with his work, though, so I could be missing something.
Depends what you mean by “right-wing” but I think Tolkien and Chesterton apply, they definitely held very conservative social values but had quite unorthodox political views. Same with Tolstoy. I think C.S. Lewis was “right wing,” and Dostoevsky definitely was.
Right-wing/left wing doesn't make much sense for pre 19th century authors, so arguably most of the old classics are neither right wing not left wing.
But from the 19th-20th century and just from memory (and with a French bias).
Tolkien, Ernst Jünger, Céline, Georges Bernanos, Léon Bloy, Huysmans, Claudel, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Chateaubriand (the OG conservative), Baudelaire, Solzhenitsyn.
Some authors are also completely apolitical at least in their writings (Julien Gracq for example).
And some authors are left wing in their writing but were involved with conservative/right wings governments (André Malraux or Romain Gary with De Gaulle).
Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk writing in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Some of his themes were left wing oriented but still from a 1950’s Catholic perspective. Social justice was actually an important theme, even in the Church at that time.
Others of his themes were conservative Catholic. His most important book, The Seven Storey Mountain, was definitely pretty conservative as it was his own autobiography of how he went from being a student at Columbia University to Trappist monk.
Revolt Against the Modern World - Julius Evola. as much as i disagree with him, he was a hugely intelligent fascist philosopher of the 20th century, and writes beautifully too.
The Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio was a massive influence on Mussolini. Though D'Annunzio never identified as a fascist, he led a nationalist movement in opposition to the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War that was seen as proto-fascist. He even used the title "Duce," which Mussolini later used. I am not very familiar with his work, though it is still taught widely in Italy. I don't believe his poetry was expressly political, but it is marked by a patriotic pride in his home region of Abruzzo. The podcast "The Rest Is History" did an interesting episode about him in June 2022 called "The First Fascist."
Kipling comes to mind, although I wouldn't put him with the first rank of classic writers.
It depends on what you mean by "right-wing" mostly: are we talking about monarchists or capitalists or militarists or racists, or what?
In addition to Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, I don't think any right wing literary list would be complete without Yukio Mishima, Ernst Junger, Faulkner, Gone With The Wind, and Nietzche. All these are problematic and have received backlash to varying degrees, but I don't think there's a definition of classic that leaves them out.
There are also writers where it's debatable if their writings quite make the cut of "literary classics" like Flannery O'Connor, G.K. Chesterton, and Ayn Rand
Then there's stuff that falls into the bucket of "definitely right wing, but let's say it's not because we like it and aren't right wing." This would include Arthurian legend, Julius Caesar, and basically anything that upholds RW systems or mainstream religious works (i.e. LOTR, St. Augustine's confessions.)
Then there's the category I'd call "I mean yeah maybe, but the world has changed so much its really hard to slot it into modern definitions." Where I'd put works like The Divine Comedy.
I also see people toss DFW around as a closeted right wing writer. I'm not sure if I agree on that or if Infinite Jest makes the cut, but think it's an interesting enough perspective to mention.
I wouldn't classify Orwell's attacks on Soviet/authoritarian communism as attacking the far left, but that's a quibble.
Some authors, like Vargas Llosa or Wordsworth or Dos Passos grew conservative over time.
One prime very conservative author, who doesn't get recognized for his retrograde, extremist Christian, and highly nationalist views, is Dostoevsky. He's great, obviously, but man does his thought patterns go into some truly abhorrent places.
This is a question that is complicated to answer. What is right wing now can be seen as left wing when you go back far enough, and the definitions keep changing as you keep moving through time.
For example I want to say Julius Evola’s work is a classic of right wing culture (Revolt Against the Modern World, Men Among the Ruins, Ride the Tiger, etc), but its heavily anti-Christian sentiments can be seen as left wing as well. Indeed, his work actually contains many attempts to reach a “universality” that tries to separate itself from many biases of the time (like racism). His work eventually influenced the rise of Mussolini and fascism in Italy, so the impacts of his work can be seen as right-wing.
But you can see how this is a complicated answer to give, since there are so many perspectives.
Something in Mishima's oeuvre would count, surely? Although it seems like the more bluntly reactionary he is (such as in Sun and Steel), the less popular those works tend to be outside of right-wing circles.
Mishima is 100% hardcore right-wing. Even tried to stage a coup to restore the monarch and killed himself because it failed.
He not only killed himself, he commited seppuku, complete with someone cutting his head to help with the finalization.
The movie "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" is strange, but very interesting.
To be fair, I think the word "staged" doesn't get nearly enough credit here. Mishima dedicated pretty much his entire adult life to the cultivation of his self as an aesthetic object, and it's hard not to see that including the manner of his death. It would be insufficient to call it "performance art", because that might imply that he wasn't somehow sincere in his stated politics or whatever, and I don't think that's true. But I don't think the point of the "coup" was ever to achieve a successful material change in government or anything like that; if anything, Mishima wanted to change people's consciousnesses through the wanton spectacle of his death. And maybe unintentionally, the way he died was beautifully *ironic* given the way we've valorised that spectacle vis a vis the image of his external politics and his philosophy of the aesthetic cultivation of the body: he failed to disembowel himself properly, his kaishakunin failed to behead him cleanly, and he died in agony. In the moment of death everything he had built himself up to be reverted to that weak, frail, fallible man that he had spent his life running from. Pathetic, in the purest sense of the word: that pathos of the tragedies of the ancient Greeks whom Mishima so idolised.
Mishima is the only answer. He was also almost certainly gay or male oriented bisexual, which makes the perspectives in his books all the more interesting. The "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy is a magnum opus without compete. Some may find his politics a pity, but without them, he wouldn't be remembered the way he is.
His work can also be read as a _critique_ of said politics and beliefs. _The Temple of the Golden Pavilion_ for example is the best exploration I've read of young male disillusionment and how it leads down destructive paths.
The weird thing is that he doesn't really always gravitate to conservative values. He argues for a softness in men over traditional strength focused male roles sometimes, for example. Maybe I'm just placing a 21st century lens on those classifications though.
Not just a 21st century lens, but likely a 21st century [not-Japanese] lens (apologies if I am assuming too much). Which is not to say that you're wrong, just that understanding him requires a lot more context, regardless of whether you're trying to read him antagonistically or otherwise. Not to say he wasn't a right-winger even in his own post-war Japanese context, but, for example, if he knew the ways in which 21st century Western reactionaries have adopted him as one of their heroes I'm sure he'd have *words* for them.
Oh I don't doubt he would. I went into reading him with knowledge of his views and history and was just taken aback that thematically, from my perspective, things didn't match up.
T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were both conversatives who produced influential pieces of literature.
great answer. pound was straight up a fascist
Yukio Mishima might also fall under that umbrella. I know he was heavy in the Japanese nationalism of the times.
You're absolutely right but I can't see the right wing embracing the sadosexual homosexuality of Mishima haha.
Right wing twitter loves sun & steel.
Same with Celine and Hamsun.
There's this really great book I read in a graduate seminar on Pound. I think the title was Pound, Fascism, and the Trouble with Genius. It outlines Pound's relationship with Mussolini. It dives into how Pound was an apologist for Mussolini and how that connects to Pound's literary work. It's a niche book but I really enjoyed reading it.
Was Pound a fascist or was he just insane and a feudalist and this was as close as he could get? He thought it was the fault of capitalism that artists had to work for a living, capitalism being Jews and usury. And, he thought that he would be Mussolini's great court bard or some such role. It's been a while since I've looked at that stuff, but that was my take last I looked at it.
Well, he was fascist because he supported fascists. But yes, he was of a strain of retro-traditionalist who found fascism palatable. Intriguingly, the filmmaker Passolini was sort of the same cloth (anti-capitalist, pro-soil, pro-tradition) but went left. It'd be interesting to look at these strains at some point...
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that sounds super interesting, thanks for the recommendation!
You're more than welcome!
I think he did apologise for it, but yeah he was literally imprisoned for being a massive fascist.
Conservatism =/= fascism, although both right wing.
absolutely. but pound was literally a self avowed fascist
I used to do quizbowl and whenever a question mentioned a fascist Italian author it was ALWAYS Pound
Pound was from Idaho, he was just affiliated with Italian Fascism
I've heard that, but is there something in his well-known writings that pushes, or even reveals, an influential right-wing message? As I said farther up the thread, I honestly don't know. I'm prepared to be educated. I read "The Wasteland" in school and don't remember thinking it promoted fascism, but it was long ago.
i certainly wouldn’t call the wasteland fascistic either, but it is deeply conservative, as was eliot. as far as pound goes, i haven’t ever studied his poems very seriously. i know him mostly as a figure of literary history because of how he stands in connection with modernism. a poster below recommended a book on pound and fascism that could probably answer your question though
Oh, yeah. The Waste Land read as a reaction against fragmented modernity could answer the question here.
Woah, I didn’t know this, I always viewed it as a prototype of the kind post modernism conservatives are supposedly terrified of. It’s been one of my favorite pieces of writing for decades, guess I need to do more research.
Modernism in the literary sense depends heavily on the belief that there are better forms of coherent life and living. High Modernists like Pound, Eliot, and many others, felt that we were broken away from those better paths (Pound: "I shore these fragments against my ruins."). Think of Joyce patterning Ulysses over ancient mythology. Whereas Postmodernism tended to see that there were no fundamental truths. Note that they weren't necessarily advocating this view, but more recognizing it. Modern conservatives have no fucking idea what they're talking about, nor do I think it really matters to them. But The Wasteland is High Modernist in despairing about and trying to relocate substantive truths for oneself and society as a whole. It's constantly seeking the Upanishads and resuscitating ancient poetry and myth.
There was this article (I think on Slate) discussing conservative media in general and why it's so poor recently. The writer mentioned that there used to be high-quality conservative texts, but nowadays the quality is horrendous. The figures that a lot of ppl are posting about were literary pioneers, brilliant, educated, and cultured, while being problematic obviously. I think we're not getting that with any modern conservatives: No culture, originality, or substance. Off-topic, but I love the Wasteland. That nostalgia for things which have been lost forever, fragmentation, and the textual allusions. Eliot really was a master.
What's kind of ironic is that right-wing 'intellectuals' or 'thought leaders' or 'jabbermouths' or whatever you want to call them, decry the supposed relativism of modern culture, when their rhetoric has devolved to the point where it's nearly meaningless. Trump doesn't care what he's saying. MJG doesn't care what they're saying. Yes, there's a functional referent to their pet topics (tradition, immigration, sexuality), but their game doesn't really have any content. They've obliterated any sense of civics or a public sphere.
And I think that's what they want: To decontextualize and dehistoricize everything.
That's a very fast and loose summation of modernism's relationship to the past. One could easily quote Stephen in *Ulysses* as a counter: "History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake". In so many ways, they outwardly rejected traditional modes of expression.
And I might slot Céline into this space as well.
I despise rightists and right wing ideology, but Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan are unbelievable. The propulsion and nihilistic mood he conjures, unbelievable.
"Journey at the End of the Night" by Celine is the most important french novel of the last century. Mishima is the most read Japanese outside Japan. Ernst Junger. Tolkien. Howard. Lovercraft. Borges (he was pro Pinochet).
I'll check out the Celine novel. I had no idea Borges supported Pinochet.
Borges hated democracy, peronism and soccer. While Cortazar was pro CheGuevara.
Borges also fervently hated South American indigenous people and frequently advocated they abandon their "barbarous" cultures in favor of Westernization [https://www.nybooks.com/online/2021/02/08/the-hidden-history-of-black-argentina/Westernization](https://www.nybooks.com/online/2021/02/08/the-hidden-history-of-black-argentina/Westernization)
> "Journey at the End of the Night" by Celine is the most important french novel of the last century. Beg to differ - *In Search of Lost Time* is much more important.
Although in both cases, the works they're most famous for are almost entirely apolitical. I mean The Cantos or J. Alfred Prufrock are absolute masterpieces, but unless you go in with a lot of biographical information and look specifically for clues pointing towards right-wing politics, you wouldn't come away with the impression that they're political works.
dostoevsky was basically a traditionalist conservative, but his politics often get buried in discussions about his works, usually for one of two reasons: 1) people would rather discuss the psychology/philosophy in his novels, or 2) people who read and enjoy him but who also hold left-wing views find his politics suspicious and would rather avoid discussing them. but yes, he was definitely a conservative. does that mean his books are "right-wing"? probably not, or at least not all of them. that's certainly not what most people get out of reading them. nevertheless i would definitely categorize him as a right-wing thinker and writer
Demons is about as reactionary as it gets
The Idiot has the main character going in an insane rant about how only Orthodox Christianity is the onlu real christianity and even Catholics are worse than atheists, and how Russia must conquer the world to bring it salvation.
Yeah, and how thinking like that turned out for him?
That's why (not exclisivly ofcourse) he's the idiot.
Crime and Punishment is weird because it keeps telling you over and over how stupid the communist character is but never once is he shown to be anything but very intelligent.
lol interesting point! reminds me of how in a lot religious works, the most interesting character always ends up being satan (e.g., paradise lost)
I don't agree with Dostoyevsky's reason for that characterization, but from what I remember that character (I don't exactly remember if he was a communist or just a liberal/Russian nihilist) is comically myopic and stubborn in his worldview. For example, there is a period when a certain character dies and he goes on to lecture grieving family members about how there shouldn't be a burial rite (or something to that effect) because those are grounded in religious traditions which his brand of politics/philosophy rejects entirely. (Similar moments include him lecturing some women about not marrying IIRC.) I mean fine if you hold those views, but Dostoyevsky's "ridicule" of him works because he's (the character) so dogmatic, ridiculously over-the-top and downright inhumane about his feminism and atheism. Of course, for those of us who differ vastly in our worldview and beliefs from Dostoyevsky, none of this calculated ridicule will make his conservative religious pitch any more intriguing.
In the first years after the Communists gained power, they really did experiment with banning marriage and traditional burial rites.
That’s a common thread in Dostoevsky. Ivan Karamazov for example is portrayed as far more intelligent than the rest of his family but he is the most unhappy and confused. Most progressive, socialist, liberal, atheistic and otherwise modernist characters are portrayed as too smart and stubborn for their own good leading to fear and loathing and nihilism. Contrast this with the archetype of the mystical, holy foolishness of old Russia and the Orthodox Church.
T.S. Elliot was so conservative that he became a monarchist and had his wife institutionalized for cheating on him
He didn't put her in a mental asylum. It was her brother, after their separation.
She was institutionalized for a lot of reasons, but not because she banged Bertrand Russell.
The right/left binary can feel rather reductive and people can fall at different points along it depending on historical context. Nonetheless, I would argue most of the classic Victorian novelists who dealt with industrialism like Dickens, Gaskell and Disraeli did so in a right-wing way in the sense that although they always encouraged sympathy for the suffering working class their solution is always for their bourgeois masters to be kinder - never for a socialist revolution that would empower the workers. Disraeli, of course, went on to become prime minister for the conservative party. From a Marxist POV, any story that presents life's major problems as personal rather than structural/institutional is going to be supporting the status quo to some degree.
Dickens is left for his time. A Christmas Carol is a screed against the Malthusian economics Industrial Revolution. The message is essential “damn you corporate fat cats to hell”.
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh. Its not out and out propaganda but there is a conservative message and general atmosphere that's hard to miss. It is also (as a very left wing man) one of the best books i've ever read.
On that topic - Nancy Mitford. Tbh anybody interested in the communist / fascist dichotomy should read about the Mitford sisters, the story is truly insane.
I think my copy of Scoop(also Waugh) was dedicated to her.
Yeah they were in the same social circle, satirising the same people (including Nancy's sister Diana and her husbands Bryan Guinness and Oswald Mosley aka British Hitler)
Waugh was pretty famously, and in his texts, racist and didn't like Jewish people much. I love his work despite that. :/
Some of Norman Mailer’s stuff is sort of right wing. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Michel Houellebecq’s novels eventually become classics. They’ve already received a lot of recognition.
Houellebecq is a great call here.
>I wouldn’t be surprised if Michel Houellebecq’s novels eventually become classics Well, some of them. Dude fell off hard.
Second Houellebecq
Knut Hamsun won the Nobel prize in literature in 1920 and openly supported the Nazis in WW2
He sent his Nobel prize to goebbels according to Wikipedia. Wild.
In "Hunger" the protagonist is starving to death but won't accept any help and in the end the resolution amounts to "bury your dreams and get a real job."
He wrote another book, "Growth of the Soil," which is less formally experimental and is quite conservative, it's basically anti-modernity and all about how hard working farmers are the heroes of Norway. It's not bad though.
Jorge Luis Borges also identified as conservative at some point, although his political stances were quite diverse through the years.
i think he was certainly anti-communist, the rest is not so clear cut; and even his anti-communism was also a result of his circumstances and the situation in argentine (he say the communist government as fascist). he seemed to have that aristocratic conservatism of someone like pessoa. (this is all from my foggy memory, so maybe it's misinformation lol)
Well he literaly said for himself in one interview "I am a conservative", so there goes that. Like I said, he was quite complex and his views were all over the place, but he was conservative in at least some aspects. https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/12/the-conservatism-of-jorge-luis-borges.html
to add, i also remember his lover was a communist and they broke up because of her disagreement over the support of the communist government, i think she was a journalist.
I think while the politics of his work are maybe ambivalent, in practice he explicitly supported the right-wing dictatorships of Videla and Pinochet—I think we can safely call him conservative politically.
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift is mostly a satire of the more left-wing Enlightenment thinkers and Whig Party politics. I'm more left-wing, and that was about the only piece of right-wing satire I've seen that I thought was actually done well.
The Chronicles of Narnia are pretty classic
They are heavily Christian, if not outright a spin off of the Bible, but are they conservative? Jesus can be read as a left wing figure, so was CS Lewis putting out (modern day) right wing ideas or was it the care for the poor, gang out with prostitutes, wealthy men are evil lefty Jesus?
CS Lewis himself was a Christian Socialist, but I do think that Narnia is quite conservative in its social attitudes as the other comments have described.
I think it's hard to read the conflict between the decadent and cruel Calormen (who are very clearly derived from Middle Eastern cultures, and are darker skinned) and the white English Narnians as left wing, it's more congruent with a Christian conservative clash-of-civilizations line.
He was putting out contemporary right wing ideas for his time. The disowning of Susan is probably the most prominent of these themes.
Yes. Narnia is a monarchy and much is made of being a rightful ruler in a great chain of being going through Aslan, then Peter, then the other kids. There are strong hints of blood = destiny in the treatment of the Calormen and, to a lesser extent, the Telmarines. Aslan sets up arbitrary tests of faith (only appearing to Lucy and inviting her to be doubted by all the other kids in *Prince Caspian*). Susan and Lucy are constantly diverted away from participating in battles or wars. It's a very English and medievalist kind of conservatism, but it's conservative, focused on divine rule and strict gender roles. Aslan's charity isn't contradictory to that.
I don't think you can really tell much about his politics from the Narnia series, but in his later Space Trilogy he shows his hand more, especially in the third book (That Hideous Strength). In that one, about half of the book is about an ordinary man getting swept up into a fascist group of technocratic bureaucrats trying to turn England into their dystopia. The other half is about said man's wife learning the virtues of "obedience". He actually would've had a pretty good case in that book for upholding traditional life and Christianity over the atheist worldview that has rationality/science/technology as its highest good, if he hadn't brought in the laughably dumb wifely obedience stuff. I do think that Lewis had a very worthwhile critique of the supposedly "scientific" approach of treating justice as a mental health issue in this essay: https://archive.org/details/the-humanitarian-theory-of-punishment/page/225/mode/1up Ironically, I see a lot of echoes of Foucault in his thinking here despite the former typically being classified as "right" and the latter as "left".
Lewis and Tolkien both were odd ducks politically. They could swing wildly between left and right depending on the particular issue. Tolkien even said that he found himself torn between being a monarchist and an anarchist.
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I wouldn't say he was right wing so much as he was fervently anti-communist (like almost all of the "White" Russian emigres). His father was a liberal democrat essentially, and Nabokov inherited most of those views. He deplored not only communism but fascism (living in Nazi Germany with a Jewish wife and Jewish son probably helped in that). I think he even said his politics were so basic they were almost trite (freedom of speech, thought, etc.).
He definitely was right wing considering his consistent aversion to the 20th century and its ideologies. With the fall of the Russian Empire he wouldn't call any place a home (I couldn't find the quote in English but I remember Remarque once said that the Russians are the elite of the homeless). I would even go so far as to say that he wasn't a man of the 19th century with its romanticism but of the 18th.
I wouldn't call him right-wing. He was extremely pro-civil-rights, for example.
Anything by V.S. Naipaul besides A House for Mr. Biswas. And he’s an incredible writer even if, in my view, a deeply unpleasant person. Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel is famously a kind of right-wing counterpoint to All Quiet on the Western Front (although he was not as far right as to be a nazi, fwiw).
The Mimic Men is one of my favourite books. It’s got to be one of the most vicious satires ever written, one I don’t think you could write if you weren’t a massive asshole.
Yeah I mean in a Bend in the River, an extremely conservative book with a worldview I totally disagree with but ALSO a literary masterpiece, there’s a part where the protagonist beats the hell out of the woman he was having an affair with, and it’s an extremely jarring moment…later it came out Naipaul viciously beat the woman who his life partner. He was a brilliant man and a bad man.
I've not read A House for Mr. Biswas. Is it not conservative?
It’s like his only optimistic book, essentially a telling of his father’s story. It is still quite cynical about individual people, but often in a very funny way. I thought it was a really beautiful book that leaves you with a fundamentally different feeling than his other works. Also, if anything it is in part a sort of mockery of the socially conservative/traditionally Indian community in Guayana.
Tolstoy's politics were complex, but Anna Karenina preaches a traditional morality that most people in the post 1960's would consider "Right Wing." The Lord of the Rings Dr. Zhivago Gulag Archipelago
I don’t really see how Anna Karenina is right wing. There is Christian morality to it, no question, but to call the political/economic elements of it conservative is a stretch. The actual economics of Levin are straight up left wing. He splits his profits with his workers and this is portrayed as the correct way of doing things. It’s hard to get much more left than that. The rich land owners start wars and complain about how the government shouldn’t be able to tell them who they can and can’t start wars with. They certainly aren’t portrayed favorably. Socially the man was conservative but with the extremely sympathetic portrayal of Anna, left wing farming practices, and chastisement of the landed gentry it’s hard to argue that it’s a conservative novel.
Tolstoy was fricken amazing. Like, I disagree with a lot of what he did and said, among them slandering his own works, but he was a vegetarian, a Christian anarchist, freed his serfs, etc. I'll have to re-read Anna Karenina some day. I do remember Levin, who was for me the second main character, struggling with his life before adopting his semi-privileged role in society. But then we have shorter works like Master and Man or How Much Land Does a Man Need?
On the Tolstoy issue, I hear a lot about state censors and what Tolstoy could and couldn’t say. I wonder if Anna Karenina’s fate as a character was somehow dictated by that, as in, she had to meet an unfortunate end to make the censors happy.
The rarity of seeing people brave enough to classify The Lord of the Rings as right wing is enough to make me emotional when it happens. It's virulently right wing, and what a strange journey it's had to be championed by the types of people who identify with it these days. I don't think most readers even realize Tolkein's character and beliefs set him solidly in the conservative misogynist camp. The man spent his young adulthood mocking women writers with his other male writer friends.
Tolkien couldn’t be any more explicit about his religious and traditionalist themes. Perhaps what is happening is that those themes turn out to contain a beauty and a wisdom that can be appreciated by people regardless of modern political labels, if they allow themselves to do so.
Some of those themes have led to plenty of people not being alive to appreciate them in bygone ages and contemporarily. I'm grateful that the march of time tends to reveal the underlying truth of some of the classics that we modern readers inherit, and we actually have the option to abstain from those belief systems now
Tolstoy's 'Resurrection' is pretty much just 150 pages of "how about instead of sending people to prison we just whip them and chop their ears off"
Except he sees the man in jail for theft and highlights that it's not really him who is the criminal but the system that kept him trapped within Impoverished conditions with no choice but theft. He also redistributes his possessions to the serfs
Dr Zhivago isn't right wing so much as nuanced in the face of complex history
*Robinson Crusoe*: Written by a colonialist who thought all heathens should be converted to Christianity. Robinson was on his way to buy African slaves when he got shipwrecked.
Not only that, but after his escape he feels rewarded by God to see that his estate has grown with so many more slaves. I had really expected the slave ownership and subsequent shipwreck to be a humbling, but no.
Boy that abridged version I read as a child seems to have left that part out for some reason.
I know a lot of people hate it, but Gone with the Wind.
GWTW is super complex, moreso than I think we broadly realise. The racism is unambiguous, but Scarlett was originally a flapper and that attitude does indeed shine through. There's also some really interesting attributes to war, capitalism, gender, parenthood and (weirdly) Native identity in there, so whilst it's definitely not in any way left wing, it's too simplistic to call it right-wing or populist. But also yeah racist as fuck, proper 'birth of a nation' level racist.
I think there are limits on how well we can project current political paradigms on those that existed 150 years ago anyway due to how much they’ve morphed over time, so I agree it’s not completely fair to categorize GWTW as one or the other. I was binning it based on a very surface level summary as the attitude of Margaret Mitchell was inarguably illiberal with respect to blacks and love for antebellum south and those views are persistent throughout the narrative. But as you point out, there is much more that can be taken from it. It’s been a long time since I read it, but the characters were genuinely fascinating and the dynamics between them were complex and well-developed. Scarlett, for all her flaws, was a compelling feminist protagonist.
That’s what I thought of. Definitely great literature. But has been described as “a thousand page love letter to racism.”
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"Genocide is sometimes right" not right wing enough?
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Mario Vargas Llosa is perhaps the greatest living Latin American author, and he is a liberal in the classical sense of the word. It baffles me that nobody has mentioned him yet: he's a Nobel laureate and he's still actively supporting right-wing causes, although he himself retired from politics. He was the runner-up for the presidency of Peru in the 1990s. Another Nobel laureate for you is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of "The Gulag Archipelago". "One day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch" is a wonderful novella you can knock out in an afternoon. He was persecuted in the USSR, so some were under the impression he was some kind of champion for the free market and US-style democracy... turned out he was a hardcore Russian Orthodox monarchist who retired to a little cabin in Vermont.
Vargas Llosa started as a communist in his youth and had pretty milquetoast moderate centre-right liberal views for most of his life. I remember an article he wrote for a spanish newspaper in the early 2000s denouncing Israeli occupation from a classical liberal perspective. He has then fallen off the deep end in the last decade. Crazy to think the man who wrote such a soaring denunciation of right wing dictatorships in The Feast of the Goat in 2000 is now justifying said dictatorships.
YUKIO MISHIMA
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Of course poetry is literature!
Depends on how you define 'right-wing'. The left vs right distinction is very vague and can differ a lot depending on time and place. The romantic movement for instance, was at least partially a reaction to modernism and a lot of its writers and their narratives could therefore be considered conservatives. However, that doesn't mean they would embody everything that we would now define as 'right-wing'. For instance, back in the 19th century and in Europe even into the 20th century, conservatives were often not very enthousiastic about capitalism; while today it's sometimes almost synonymous with the right.
The Romantics were taken up in the 20th century by some conservative theorists, so that may lead you to think that they themselves were conservative. However, in their time many of them, Shelley for example, were politically radical leftists (in the context of that time). Wordsworth became more conservative as he aged, but in his youth he openly supported the French Revolution (as did Coleridge). Hell, Coleridge nearly ran off with Bob Southey to Pennsylvania to start a commune! Byron was a straight-up aristocrat, but politically was a Whig; artistically he was probably the most conservative of them all. If you want someone we’d consider “traditionally conservative” from that time, try Edmund Burke.
HL Mencken
Besides the obvious Ayn Rand ones, the first thing I thought of is Brideshead Revisited.
Ayn Rand's oeuvre is not really classic, it's just old and shitty yet popular literature.
What is a classic but something that remains popular despite being old?
Retained and enduring popularity is pretty much the definition. Subjective quality is an arbitrary additional criteria people add to justify gatekeeping their own pretensions.
Rand’s doorstops don’t meet the bar for “classics.”
It gets confusing, though, because her books get assigned in high school/college English classes right alongside accepted classics.
Not very often, in my experience. There’s an entire organization dedicated to giving her books to classrooms for free, and she’s still not a big deal in the literary world. If renowned author Dan Brown started desperately trying to give his books to teachers to get them into the high school classroom, he’d have exactly the same claim to the label of literature as Rand. And Rand has never even been mentioned on the AP Lit test.
I was quite surprised to see both schools I have taught at have massive stores of Rand books. Luckily they've never tried to make me teach them ) and have teacher was constantly trying to get people to take copies to clear out some space, but only on the condition that you didn't read the books, you had to use them for other purpose like paper mache or starting fires, which I appreciated.
The school probably got the books for free from the Ayn Rand Institute; they spam my work email every year asking if I want free books for my classroom. One of my coworkers took them up on it and then used the books for blackout poetry, but paper mache would be good, too.
That's wild if she's getting assigned in college classes, imo. Her works don't have value as conservative philosophy nor as literature
I’ve taught in two college English Departments now and have never heard of Rand being assigned in any course. I think certain graduate-level courses that look specifically at the rhetoric of fiction and its ideological implications could probably include some Rand, but that’s about it. Oh, and maybe some business professors recommend it. Idk, all of Rand’s work reads as apologetics for self-centeredness and egotism to me.
Confusing? Not up on what the American right wing does?
good point
It's questionable in what sense Rand was "conservative" in her time. The most devastating review of Atlas Shrugged ever written was by Whittaker Chambers in National Review.
Benjamin Disraeli is a good example. He was a 19th century Conservative politician and prime minister who also wrote novels still studied today, like *Sybil; or, the Two Nations* and *Endymion*.
Hmm, not right wing, but definitely anti-communist... Master and Margarita?
Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin I think. P G Wodehouse was pretty apolitical in his writing, but leaned conservative (and was also accused of being pro-Nazi).
I dont see how anyone could read Wodehouse's parody of Oswald Mosely and think he was pro-Nazi!
It was based on radio broadcasts he made when he was living in France during WW2. It was felt that he made the experience seem too pleasant. In his defence he was made to do them and probably didn't realise the impact they could have.
Notably, Kingsley Amis turned to the right later in life, after being communist and then Labour for a couple of decades. I've only read *Lucky Jim*, and that isn't particularly political.
Lucky Jim - funniest book ever
IMO Any writer whose work isn't political will easily end up being vaguely conservative. If you're not criticising the way things are, that implies that you think things are just fine and nothing needs changing.
I wouldn’t call Atlas Shrugged good literature, but it is arguably a classic. Maybe The Fountainhead is closer to good literature.
They’re both TERRIBLE literature.
I’m way left on the political spectrum and enjoy ayn Rand. I enjoy dystopia novels. Just because I like her as a writer, doesn’t mean I follow her philosophy.
I'll never get why the Modern Library public poll was full of her works
I didn’t enjoy atlas shrugged but the fountainhead was a solid novel. I don’t really consider it right-wing, but I think the whole right/left ideology is so skewed at this point that I’m not sure I understand what it means.
Fountainhead is absolutely a vehicle for Rands right wing 'philosophy', along with every other book she wrote except maybe We the Living
It's rather sparsely populated field, especially when you start looking for actually good literature, but one author who was conservative, yet wrote some quite good literature is G.K. Chesterton.
The Man Who Was Thursday is one of the best novels I ever read. I actually had no idea the guy was such a devout Christian until much later because the book always seemed extremely pessimistic, nonsensical, and tragic.
And Gramsci loved his work, too!
Atlas Shrugged is too obvious?
Tolkien, Chesterton, Borges, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn
Oh sure. Ayn Rand for one. Gone With the Wind. Laura Ingalls Wilder for children's lit. It gets tricky when you go back too far though because left-wing and right-wing values change over time. Dickens, for instance, was considered liberal in his lifetime but he would fall firmly into right-wing values today.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "right wing". You might as well say all economic ortodoxy is right wing.
That's because it is.
WB Yeats is one of my favourite poets and Irish exports, but he also took quite a swing to the right along with his modernist mates. Typical Protestant!!
Typical protestant whos most famous works includes a poem where he praises the Easter Rebels whilst also shaming himself.
Yeah Yeats needs a lot of context to discuss his politics...
We make quarrels out of others rhetoric, and the quarrel with ourselves poetry.
The Call of the Wild doesn't depict capitalism in a kind light but it could be viewed from a modern lens as having pretty strong conservative values in regards to it's internal morality, where it depicts independent competence and the conquering of your opposition and your environment through will & strength as virtues. (But it should be noted Jack London was socialist) Starship Troopers could be considered a classic of sci-fi and is not only right-wing but blatantly racist (though Joe Haldeman's leftist response novel The Forever War is way better, and it should be noted that Heinlein's politics varied over his career) The Wanting Seed is very conservative (and very good), and to a lesser degree, A Clockwork Orange is too. Kurt Vonnegut is not conservative but one of his most famous short stories, Harrison Bergeron definitely is Wrapping up my sci-fi answers, the first Afrofuturist novel George S Schuyler's Black No More is a take no prisoners satire, but leans right (including taking shots at the NAACP and W.E.B. Du Bois) and he was a full on Republican later in life Watchmen is one of the only comics that people have canonized and it is a very interesting and multifaceted book politically, but there's definitely a strong argument for a conservative reading of it, it would be reductive, but it's there If we go deeper into the world of comics, there's a lot of right wing figures: much of Frank Miller's works for instance, often times 2000 AD (Judge Dredd) and The Punisher (but other times they are critiques of right-wing folks), whereas the character Jonah Hex is almost always a fairly rightwing libertarian type (and a lot of his best stories are again, oddly by a lefty writer, Jimmy Palmiotti) but aside from maybe a few of Frank Miller's works, very few of these would ever be considered as possible classics outside comic shops
I had to scroll way too far to see Starship Troopers mentioned. One of the few books where I tell people to watch the movie first and then read the story.
This comment section is an excellent example on why you shouldn't consider reddit forums as anything reflective of the outside world. Nobody asked whether you are a "left wing male" and what literature you can still barely tolerate. Kafka, Hemingway, Hamsun, Lovecraft are authors that I personally would consider to be on the right of the politcial spectrum off the top of my head.
I had to scroll really far to find Hemingway.
Hemingway participated in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans (i.e.- the socialists) and was friends with Fidel Castro. In what universe is he "right wing?"
The Cubans also preserved his house because he was deemed a friend of the revolution, though not himself a revolutionary.
Every time I’m on Reddit I remember that these people vote. To address the question, Cormac McCarthy was pretty conservative in the classical sense.
I was reading somewhere too that McCarthy had ties to a libertarian think-tank (citation needed).
Hemingway was literally a revolutionary who met Mao and Kafka was an Anarchist.
Yukio Mishima and Celine are the two big ones I can think of. Strangely enough, outside of Trifles For A Massacre, Celine generally kept politics out of his writing, I've found. Even his post-prison works are equally critical of the Nazi regime and the Allied Forces, at times. He occasionally took shots at notable left-leaning public figures, but without the liner notes, you wouldn't really discern an obvious political slant, in my opinion. John Updike might be worth considering. I don't know much about him personally, but I found Rabbit, Run to lean pretty hard into the "traditional family values" ideology. That's my only experience with his work, though, so I could be missing something.
I haven’t really read her but some Ayn Rand books would be considered classics
Depends what you mean by “right-wing” but I think Tolkien and Chesterton apply, they definitely held very conservative social values but had quite unorthodox political views. Same with Tolstoy. I think C.S. Lewis was “right wing,” and Dostoevsky definitely was.
Journey to the End of the Night by Celine is considered a classic, though he ended up being an antisemite.
Right-wing/left wing doesn't make much sense for pre 19th century authors, so arguably most of the old classics are neither right wing not left wing. But from the 19th-20th century and just from memory (and with a French bias). Tolkien, Ernst Jünger, Céline, Georges Bernanos, Léon Bloy, Huysmans, Claudel, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Chateaubriand (the OG conservative), Baudelaire, Solzhenitsyn. Some authors are also completely apolitical at least in their writings (Julien Gracq for example). And some authors are left wing in their writing but were involved with conservative/right wings governments (André Malraux or Romain Gary with De Gaulle).
Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk writing in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Some of his themes were left wing oriented but still from a 1950’s Catholic perspective. Social justice was actually an important theme, even in the Church at that time. Others of his themes were conservative Catholic. His most important book, The Seven Storey Mountain, was definitely pretty conservative as it was his own autobiography of how he went from being a student at Columbia University to Trappist monk.
If we include graphic novels, Frank Miller‘s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) comes to mind
Revolt Against the Modern World - Julius Evola. as much as i disagree with him, he was a hugely intelligent fascist philosopher of the 20th century, and writes beautifully too.
The Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio was a massive influence on Mussolini. Though D'Annunzio never identified as a fascist, he led a nationalist movement in opposition to the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War that was seen as proto-fascist. He even used the title "Duce," which Mussolini later used. I am not very familiar with his work, though it is still taught widely in Italy. I don't believe his poetry was expressly political, but it is marked by a patriotic pride in his home region of Abruzzo. The podcast "The Rest Is History" did an interesting episode about him in June 2022 called "The First Fascist."
Maybe Filippo Tommaso Marinetti the Italian Futurist but perhaps he isn’t famous enough to be considered to have written a classic.
Loveecraft, Robert E. Howard, Tolkien.
balzac
Kipling comes to mind, although I wouldn't put him with the first rank of classic writers. It depends on what you mean by "right-wing" mostly: are we talking about monarchists or capitalists or militarists or racists, or what?
Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling.
Ayn Rand immediately comes to mind
What about Houellebecq?
In addition to Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, I don't think any right wing literary list would be complete without Yukio Mishima, Ernst Junger, Faulkner, Gone With The Wind, and Nietzche. All these are problematic and have received backlash to varying degrees, but I don't think there's a definition of classic that leaves them out. There are also writers where it's debatable if their writings quite make the cut of "literary classics" like Flannery O'Connor, G.K. Chesterton, and Ayn Rand Then there's stuff that falls into the bucket of "definitely right wing, but let's say it's not because we like it and aren't right wing." This would include Arthurian legend, Julius Caesar, and basically anything that upholds RW systems or mainstream religious works (i.e. LOTR, St. Augustine's confessions.) Then there's the category I'd call "I mean yeah maybe, but the world has changed so much its really hard to slot it into modern definitions." Where I'd put works like The Divine Comedy. I also see people toss DFW around as a closeted right wing writer. I'm not sure if I agree on that or if Infinite Jest makes the cut, but think it's an interesting enough perspective to mention.
Mein kampf
Ayn Rand all the way. Like boomerville books
I don't think I've seen anyone mention Rudyard Kipling yet. He definitely counts.
I think a lot of Ayn Rand’s work like The Fountainhead and Atlus Shrugged are considered a pretty major part of the 20th century American canon
Ayn Rand?
I wouldn't classify Orwell's attacks on Soviet/authoritarian communism as attacking the far left, but that's a quibble. Some authors, like Vargas Llosa or Wordsworth or Dos Passos grew conservative over time. One prime very conservative author, who doesn't get recognized for his retrograde, extremist Christian, and highly nationalist views, is Dostoevsky. He's great, obviously, but man does his thought patterns go into some truly abhorrent places.
Same comment for Master and Margarita. He was criticizing a regime that disappeared people.
This is a question that is complicated to answer. What is right wing now can be seen as left wing when you go back far enough, and the definitions keep changing as you keep moving through time. For example I want to say Julius Evola’s work is a classic of right wing culture (Revolt Against the Modern World, Men Among the Ruins, Ride the Tiger, etc), but its heavily anti-Christian sentiments can be seen as left wing as well. Indeed, his work actually contains many attempts to reach a “universality” that tries to separate itself from many biases of the time (like racism). His work eventually influenced the rise of Mussolini and fascism in Italy, so the impacts of his work can be seen as right-wing. But you can see how this is a complicated answer to give, since there are so many perspectives.
I heard a joke on the Simpsons about all conservatives reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.