SOURCE: Kimyongür, Angela. “Introduction.” In Socialist Realism in Louis Aragon's Le Monde réel, pp. 1-8. Hull: The University of Hull Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Kimyongür presents an overview of Aragon's sociopolitical views in his novel cycle Le Monde réel.

Louis Aragon owes his popular reputation to his poetry, both his Surrealist poetry of the early to mid 1920s and his Resistance poetry of the Second World War; but to evaluate him solely in these terms is to fail to acknowledge the varied nature of his literary career as poet, novelist, literary critic and journalist, a career which, from the late 1920s onwards, bears the imprint of his membership of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF). The focus of this study will be the cycle of novels he wrote between 1934 and 1951 entitled Le Monde réel. The cycle is made up of five novels...