Marxism

C ONTENTS

Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition Preface 1 Literature and history Marx, Engels and criticism Base and superstructure Literature and superstructure Literature and ideology Form and content History and form Form and ideology Lukács and literary form Goldmann and genetic structuralism Pierre Macherey and ‘decentred’ form

vii xi 1 1 3 8 15 19 19 23 25 29 32

2

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contents

3

The writer and commitment Art and the proletariat Lenin, Trotsky and commitment Marx, Engels and commitment The reflectionist theory Literary commitment and English Marxism The author as producer Art as production Walter Benjamin Bertolt Brecht and ‘epic’ theatre Form and production Realism or modernism? Consciousness and production

35 35 38 41 45 50 55 55 56 59 62 65 67 71 79 83

4

Notes Select Bibliography Index

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P REFACE TO THE R OUTLEDGE C LASSICS E DITION

This book was first published in 1976, just as Western history was on the turn. Although I could not have known it at the time, an era of political radicalism was just about to slide into one of political reaction. Marxism and Literary Criticism emerged from the ferment of revolutionary ideas which lasted from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. But with the oil crisis of the early 1970s, which is perhaps when that mythological entity known as the Sixties finally ground to a halt, Western economies were already plunging steeply into recession; and that economic crisis, which in Britain was to result in the root-and-branch restructuring of Western capitalism known as Thatcherism, brought in its wake a virulent assault on the labour movement, social welfare, democracy, working-class living standards and socialist ideas. In the United States, a dim-witted third-rate ex-actor of primitive right-wing opinions moved into the White

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preface to the routledge classics edition

House. The wave of colonial liberation movements which had swept from Asia to Latin America in the post-war...