Marxist literary criticism

Marxist literary criticism, a critical tradition that seeks to understand literature from the perspective of the ‘historical materialism’ developed by Marx and Engels; that is, as a changing form of material production that participates in and illuminates the processes of history. Marx himself was deeply versed in world literature, and drew upon his favourite authors (Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Goethe) even in his economic writings. Neither he nor Engels, though, bequeathed a critical or aesthetic theory, but they suggested that authors such as Balzac who held conservative political views could nonetheless, as artists, reveal the true tendencies of history, and more convincingly than socialist writers of a propagandist type; and further, that art is not tied directly to phases of economic development but has a certain autonomy. These principles are upheld in ‘classical’ Marxism, by G. Plekhanov (1856–1918), Lenin, Trotsky, and Lukács. Of these writers, it was Lukács who eventually developed a consistent Marxist critical position, one that stressed the value of 19th-cent. realism. In the Soviet Union under the tyranny of Stalin, the crudely prescriptive policy of Socialist Realism obstructed more independent critical thinking, except in the little-known Bakhtin circle.

The first significant Marxist criticism in the English-speaking world emerged within the doctrinaire constraints of Communist Party orthodoxy: Granville Hicks (1901–82) in the USA and the more imaginative Caudwell in England assessed literature in terms of its usefulness as a weapon in the class struggle. The German Marxists Benjamin and Brecht provided far more sophisticated and influential views, seeing literature less as a ‘reflection’ of history than as a ‘production’ of new meanings. Brecht's influence has been strong upon Barthes and other critics who have brought about alliances among Marxist, formalist, and post-structuralist literary theory, usually of a kind that regards realism as inherently conservative. In the English-speaking world since 1968, the foremost Marxist critics have been R. Williams, Terry Eagleton (1943– ), whose work has approached literature through the contradictions of ‘ideology’, and Fredric Jameson (1934– ), who has developed from Lukács's work a broader system for the analysis of literary and cultural forms. Resisting the assumption that Marxist criticism is pertinent only to overtly ‘sociological’ features of literature, Eagleton and Jameson have both employed its methods to illuminate general problems of literary theory and the phenomenon of postmodernism.