Andy Seal’s recent post about intellectual history and the novel of ideas has been on my mind for a week, and I’m still thinking through the many questions it and the thread that followed it raised. Is the novel of ideas an under-explored realm for intellectual history? And what is a novel of ideas, anyway? Also inspired by Andy’s topic, Peter Kuryla chimed in. What is the intellectual content of a novel, apart from its aesthetic content? What do intellectual historians actually do with their readings of novels, as opposed to what literary studies scholars or what philosophers do? I Read more