Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader 1st Edition by Terry Eagleton (PDF)

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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. 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, George Lukacs, Karl Marx, The Marxist-Feminist Collective, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Leon Trotsky, V. N. Volosinov, Galvano Della Volpe, Alick West, and Raymond Williams.

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Editorial Reviews: From the Inside Flap 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. From the Back Cover 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. About the Author 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. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is a great overview of Marxist literary theory and the more general topic of Marxist aesthetics for those people who might be getting interested in Marxist thought. Particularly valuable are its introductory essays, which nicely situate the question of literature in the broader realm of the Marxist tradition. Eagleton’s essay in particular is one of the best short pieces on Marxist aesthetics out there. The book also contains a lot of off-the-beaten-path essays that will excite those who are well-versed in the Marxist canon.Eagleton and Milne aim to give a bird’s eye view of Marxist thinking about literary works. This is both a blessing and a curse. The essays in here tend to be quite nice… the Adorno section, for example, is a great little piece about politically engaged writers such as Sartre and Brecht. But the organizational logic does have a few limitations. The most important is that these essays often aren’t particularly representative of a writer’s overall output. Just reading this Adorno essay won’t necessarily give someone a strong sense of Adorno’s agenda or the ideas he is best known for. While that’s not necessarily a dealbreaker (and some might even consider it a virtue), it does mean that this text might have a limited utility for someone first discovering Marxist thought. Further, the focus on essays specifically about literature excludes a lot of potentially relevant texts. Adorno’s essays on music or Benjamin’s writings on film, for example, are not just suggestive for how we are to understand those specific forms and their relationship to capitalism, but the relationship between art and capitalism as such. Nearly all of the writers included saw literature as one concern alongside other artistic forms, not to mention social analysis and transformative politics; in a tradition as self-consciously holistic as Marxism, thinking at that level seems almost mandatory. So, if you are discovering Marxist aesthetics for the first time, I’d suggest that you consider supplementing this book with Maynard Solomon’s Marxism and Art or Lang and Williams’ collection of the same name – those texts include canonic pieces that are important counterbalances to the ones included here.That all said, such issues are not damning, and anyway it’s more than a bit unreasonable to expect an anthology to reproduce all three volumes of Capital in their entirety just to understand a few of Marx’s aphorisms about art. This text is an important contribution to Marxist thought in general, and one of the best in the tradition of Marxist aesthetics.

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