Analysing the Matrix in Social Fiction for Its Relevance to Literature: A Study of Select Novels

Literature emerges from within society. Edward Said has stated in his famous work, Culture and Imperialism, that literature is a cultural artefact of a particular region in a specific point of time and hence literary works cannot be ‘antiseptically quarantined' from its context. Fiction as a genre, developed in mid-nineteenth century England. Although the genre has various sub-categories such as psychological, religious, industrial, proletariat and social, it is the social novels that becomes the matrix of where demography, culture, social institutions, and ideologies intersect. In the genre of fiction, culture, history, politics converge to create