ABSTRACT
But what does politics mean in this context? Usually, when conversations turn to ‘politics’ they tend to be about the parties in power, the most
recent or upcoming elections or the personal qualities of people whose job it is to be politicians. But politics is really about much more than that: the word comes from the ancient Greek word polis, meaning ‘city’, which hangs on in words like ‘metropolitan’, ‘Metropolis’ and – as characters in Men at Arms (1993) by the British writer Terry Pratchett (b. 1948) point out – ‘police officer’ and ‘politician’. But it means much more than ‘city’, also denoting ‘community’ or, more widely, ‘society’. Politics is about people, societies and how we live together, not just the events at Westminster, in Brussels or on Capitol Hill; the word covers an enormous area of human life. Of course, literature, too, is involved with people, societies and how we get along with one another. Dealing with the same issues in this way, literature and politics are inevitably bound together.
