A century or more ago politics on the international scale was one of the great themes of fiction, as War and Peace, The Charterhouse of Parma and dozens of other major novels attest. But with the twentieth century serious fiction shifted towards the psychological, the novel of inner rather than outer development. Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence and Faulkner turned toward the individual mind as the great subject of fiction, and even writers intensely conscious of political forces, such as Camus, tended to treat them primarily as aspects of the self.… Not only are political forces created by the minds that perceive them, but the true focus of fiction is on the perception itself. The mind shapes the political world.

XREF: Connects to the broader debate about the 'political novel' and the decline of epic scope in modernism.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 323