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Old June 27th 06, 06:26 PM posted to rec.collecting.books
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Default Dueling authors.... well, ideas anyway.

Has this happened in fiction before, and/or is it common where an
author seems to take aim at another? Obviously in Academia,
dissenting ideas get published regularly, but what about fiction?

And of coiurse, one could consider George Orwell's 1984, Arthur
Koestler's Darkness At Noon, and Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day In
the Life of Ivan Denisovich as responses to Karl Marx's Communist
Manifesto and Vladimir Lenin's What Is To Be Done...


Those were all responses to Stalinist practice rather than to
anything Marx or Lenin wrote, and in Orwell's case you'd be hard
put to find any major disagreements with Marx at least. I don't
think any of them even quotes or alludes to anything *Stalin*
wrote. Anyway the OP was more interested in ideological fiction
vs. other ideological fictions rather than ideological fiction
vs. a manifesto or political system. (Voltaire's _Candide_ might
be the earliest of those).

Some more that come to mind:

- Cervantes's _Don Quixote_ vs. any number of chivalric romances
- Christine de Pisan's _The Book of the City of Ladies_ vs. _The
Romance of the Rose_

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