“How does literature matter politically in the 21st century?” is the question Katharina Donn asks on the cover of The Politics of Literature in a Divided 21st Century. The direction of her focus is unexpected. She does not address the straightforward and openly political literature that has been produced in the past twenty years. Rather, her focus is specifically on literature that is not immediately or intentionally political at a first glance. “Words matter” (2), writes Donn. She hints poignantly at world leaders such as Trump and Johnson, claiming that “political language has begun, once more, to perpetuate mental slavery, or ‘thoughtlessness’ as Hannah Arendt … termed it” (3). Donn suggests that literature can become a space to combat this. It is placed in fictional worlds that focus not reactively on resistance, but actively on change, “more akin to a metamorphosis than a revolution” (6). It is through this positioning that literature can present its readers with an alternative. Depoliticized literature offers its reader a prototype of a political sphere where “metamorphosis is the destination” (16).

Donn analyses this metamorphosis in a vast variety of works. Very ambitiously – and effectively, she encompasses texts and films, theorists, politicians, artists and much more throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Throughout the chapters she analyses works such as Rankine's Citizen (2014), both Scott's 1982 and Villeneuve's 2017 Bladerunner, Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Shamsie's Burnt Shadows (2009), del Toro's The Shape of Water (2017), Satrapi's Embroideries (2006). This substantial canon of works is skilfully backed by a vast variety of theorists. Donn reads Hannah Arendt and Paul Ricoeur with Oscar Wilde, she considers Frank Bowling with Michael Rothberg, and connects Claudia Rankine's poetry with Theodor Adorno, not to mention Brecht, Rancière, Deleuze, Du Bois, Butler, Caruth, Freud, Derrida and many more. Donn skilfully weaves in examples wholly outside the realm of literature too, such as Serena Williams's opposition to racism, or Zinedine Zidane's anger in the 2006 World Cup final. By relying on such a large number of opinions, Donn proves the relevance of her theory, demonstrating the wide range of this depoliticized yet vastly political literature. She focusses on the texts themselves, not the authors or their intentions, and in doing so offers her readers an insight into the political alternatives that these works offer.

This broadness of resources can at times also be a hindrance to the depth of Donn's arguments, however. Donn very successfully portrays the political literature in the works she addresses. Nevertheless, at times readers are left with only a touch of an analysis of the works she mentions, rather than an in-depth investigation of the political literature portrayed. This results in the occasional instance where the study and incorporation of works such as Rita Indiana's Tentacle (2018), or Shaun Tan's The Arrival (2006), of which both authors were mentioned in the introduction, can feel left slightly unfinished. This in turn can sometimes result in a slight loss of clarity and an interruption of the continuity of Donn's arguments.

Nevertheless, Donn manages to apply her theory rather impressively on several major topics relevant in our contemporary societies and not only on the literature deriving from a single topic. She embarks on such relevant contemporary subjects, which include migration and borders, biopolitics, trauma and terrorism, climate change and populism, showing how “imaginative literary innovations can re-shape the conditions of our political existence and experience” (7), and in doing so holds “the mirror up to present society” (9). She does this by directing the focus of each of her chapters to one specific topic, offering her readers an insight into the adaptability of her theory within twenty-first-century works. In line with the impressive diversity that Donn covers, she does not aim to focus on “the individual reader but challenges broader societal and political conceptual frames” (14).

This book is an important piece of critical work, concerned with the most up-to-date and relevant political factors and its subsequently important depoliticized, yet political, literature. It focusses its main literary sources within the past twenty years and yet it backs up its arguments with some of the most renowned writers and theorists of the past century. Each chapter could easily invite further investigation and develop into the focus of an entirely new publication itself.