Marxist Literary Theory A Reader

by Eagleton, Terry; Milne, Drew

• ISBN13: 9780631185819
• ISBN10: 063118581X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-02-05
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader is designed to give both students and lecturers a sense of the historical formation of a Marxist literary tradition. A unique compilation of principal texts in that tradition, it offers the reader new ways of reading Marxism, literature, theory, and the social possibilities of writing. The collection is introduced by both editors: Terry Eagleton, writing at the point of what he describes as the most grievous crisis in Marxism's fraught career, surveys the evolution of Marxist criticism, and addresses the profoundly problematic question of Marxism's future, especially as seen in the controversial light of postmodern theory. Drew Milne contributes a key essay on Reading Marxist Literary Theory, exploring in the process the complex relations between Marx's writings and Marxism. Represented in this reader are: Theodor W. Adorno, Louis Althusser, Aijaz Ahmad, Chida Amuta, Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Ernest Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Alex Callinicos, Christopher Caudwell, Terry Eagleton, Friedrich Engels, Lucien Goldmann, Fredric Jameson, V. I. Lenin, Georg Lukacs, Karl Marx, The Marxist-Feminist Collective, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Leon Trotsky, V. N. Volsinov, Galvano Della Volpe, Alick West, and Raymond Williams.

Author Biography

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His works include The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) Literacy Theory: An Introduction (1983), Walter Benjamin (1981) and Marxism and Literacy Criticism (1976).

Drew Milne is a lecturer in the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Terry Eagleton

Drew Milne

Marx and Engels

Leo Tolstoy and His Epoch (1911)

The Formalist School of Peotry and Marxism

Corcerning the Relationship of the Basis and Superstructures

Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia (1929).Addendum to 'The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire' (1938)

Marxism and Poetry (1935)

English Poets: The Period of Primitive Accumulation (1937)

The Relativity of Literary Value (1937)

A Short Organum for the Theatre (1949)

The Tasks of Brechtian Criticism (1956)

The Ideology of Modernism (1957)

The Semantic Dialectic (1960)

Commitment (1962)

Introduction to the Problems of a Sociology of the Novel (1963)

The Objective Spirit (1972)

Tragedy and Revolution (1966), Literature (1977)

A Letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre (1966)

On Literature as an Ideological Form (1974)

Towards a Science of the Text (1960)

Women's Writing: Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, Aurora Leigh (1978)

On Interpretation (1981)

Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory' (1987)

Can the Subaltern Speak?(1988)

The Materialism of Cultural Nationalism: Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God (1989)

The Jargon of Postmodernity (1989)

Index

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