Can Literature Change Society?

I n 1852 a novel appeared that sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its first year and was read, argued over, adapted for the stage, and banned in parts of the country that felt most threatened by it. Abraham Lincoln is said to have greeted its author with the words, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Whether or not the remark is exact, the belief behind it was widespread: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had helped shift the moral and political weather of a nation. The question is larger than one book. Can literature—novels, plays, poems, stories—actually change society? Or does it merely reflect changes already underway? The honest answer sits between the two extremes. Literature rarely acts alone. Yet history and research both suggest that stories can alter what large groups of people feel is thinkable, feelable, and ultimately doable. Literature changes society not by issuing commands but by changing the emotional and imaginative …