Shelley's 1821 pronouncement that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" (632) probably marks the highpoint of the literary artist's confidence in the ability of literature to engage with and have an impact on the social world. One can think of a few specific examples of such engagement and impact- Melville's White-Jacket (1850) influencing legislation banning flogging on U.S. navy ships, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) crystallizing the debate over slavery, or Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) inspiring the creation of the Pure Food and Drug Act - but only a few. Otherwise, we tend to think of the social impact of literature as being more subtly epistemological and ontological: variously confirming or challenging our and our culture's values, raising consciousnesses, occasionally transforming individual lives. If, however, one believes as I do - and, I think, as many fiction writers do - that art's social role is to question, challenge, and reimagine the ideological status quo, or, as Thomas Pynchon put it in a message of support to Salman Rushdie, "that power is as much our sworn enemy as unreason" ("Words" 29), then the kinds of influences (impact is probably too strong a word) literature can have in the social world can seem pretty vague and insubstantial. William Carlos Williams's famous lament that T. S. Eliot's footnotes to The Waste Land had taken poetry out of "local conditions" and given it "back to the academics" (Williams 146), pointy-headed English professors in ivory towers, marks the opposite extreme to Shelley's confidence and represents, I imagine, the anxiety of many authors: they desire their work to intervene in the social arena, but they fear that their work - and literature in general - is increasingly irrelevant.