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Marxist literary criticism is a theory of literary criticism based on the historical materialism developed by philosopher and economist Karl Marx.Marxist critics argue that even art and literature themselves form social institutions and have specific ideological functions, based on the background and ideology of their authors.
Marxist literary criticism is a loose term describing literary criticism based on socialist and dialectic theories. [153] Marxist criticism views literary works as reflections of the social institutions from which they originate. According to Marxists, even literature is a social institution with a specific ideological function based on the ...
Eagleton began his literary studies with the 19th and 20th centuries, then conformed to the stringent academic Marxism of the 1970s. He then published an attack on his mentor Williams's relation to the Marxist tradition in the pages of the New Left Review , in the mode of the French critic Louis Althusser .
Georg Lukács (13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic, who founded Western Marxism with his magnum opus History and Class Consciousness. Written between 1919 and 1922 and first published in 1923, the collection of essays contributed to debates concerning Marxism and its relation to sociology ...
Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution claims that "old literature and 'culture' were the expressions of the nobleman and the bureaucrat" and that "the proletariat has also to create its own culture and its own art". [3] This viewpoint is common for the Marxist critical lens.
The term "Marxism" encompasses multiple "overlapping and antagonistic traditions" inspired by the work of Karl Marx, and it does not have any authoritative definition. [12] [13] The most influential texts for cultural studies are (arguably) the "Thesis on Feuerbach" and the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. [14]
Marx believed that humanity's defining characteristic was its means of production and thus the only way for man to free himself from oppression was for him to take control of the means of production. According to Marx, this is the goal of history and the elements of the superstructure act as tools of history. [12]
Marx drank heavily after joining the Trier Tavern Club drinking society in the 1830s, and continued to do so until his death. [31] Marx was afflicted by poor health, what he himself described as "the wretchedness of existence", [196] and various authors have sought to describe and explain it. His biographer Werner Blumenberg attributed it to ...