This chapter examines the ‘parliamentary novel’, a genre developed in the mid nineteenth century by Benjamin Disraeli and Anthony Trollope, as more Britons gained the right to vote. These novels often served to educate new voters about the virtues of the parliamentary system, portraying statesmen as noble figures and reinforcing traditional parliamentary ideals for an industrial society. The chapter surveys this genre, focusing on authors with first-hand experience in Parliament or close connections to MPs. It traces the genre’s evolution, particularly its post-1945 transformation from respected literature to what Gerald Kaufman labelled ‘trash’. While considering broader works by authors like Jeffrey Archer and Michael Dobbs, the chapter centres on Maurice Edelman and Edwina Currie. The motives behind these novels varied, but male authors in the genre’s classic period typically aimed to celebrate Parliament. However, as female authors emerged in the 1990s, they shifted the genre’s focus from glorifying male heroes to critiquing both these figures and Parliament itself, reflecting a growing scepticism towards male-dominated politics and altering the genre’s original celebratory purpose.

The introduction situates political writing and publishing as vital tools in articulating, disseminating, and shaping political movements and ideas in modern Britain. It explores the diversity of political genres, from elite forms such as parliamentary novels and newspaper obituaries to grassroots expressions such as punk fanzines and coalfield women’s writing. It highlights how ‘high political’ and subaltern voices respectively engaged with political writing, sometimes to reinforce dominant narratives and at other times to challenge or subvert them. It examines the gendered politics of authorship, particularly how women and marginalised groups used writing to claim authority and reshape the boundaries of political discourse. Attention is given to the role of literature and publishing in mediating the intersections of culture and politics, from fascist propaganda and socialist poetry to the intellectual infrastructure of devolved Scotland and Northern Ireland. By contextualizing political writing within broader historical and cultural transformations, the introduction positions the chapters of the book as a series of ‘core samples’ that reveal the relationships between genre, ideology, and activism.