The projection of "things as they might be and ought to be" names the essence of Ayn Rand's concept of literature. In the wave of Naturalism that has engulfed the literature of the twentieth century, her novels are an outstanding exception. They are at once a continuation of the Romantic tradition and a significant departure from the mainstream of that tradition: she is a Romantic Realist. "Romantic"—because her work is concerned with values, with the essential, the abstract, the universal in human life, and with the projection of man as a heroic being. "Realist"—because the values she selects pertain to this earth and to man's actual nature, and because the issues with which she deals are the crucial and fundamental ones of our age. Her novels do not represent a flight into mystical fantasy or the historical past or into concerns that have little if any bearing on man's actual existence. Her heroes are not knights, gladiators or adventurers in some impossible kingdom, but engineers, scientists, industrialists, men who belong on earth, men who function in modern society. As a philosopher, she has brought ethics into the context of reason, reality and man's life on earth; as a novelist, she has brought the dramatic, the exciting, the heroic, the stylized into the same context.
Just as in philosophy she rejects every version of the mystics' soul-body dichotomy: theory versus practice, thought versus action, morality versus happiness—so in literature she rejects the expression of this same dichotomy: the belief that a profound novel cannot be entertaining, and that an entertaining novel cannot be profound, that a serious, philosophical novel cannot have a dramatic plot, and that a dramatic plot-novel cannot possibly be serious or philosophical.
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