Marxist Literary Criticism Today

A compelling and accessible textbook, by a pre-eminent Marxist literary critic.

*Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Prize, 2019*

*Shortlisted for the Isaac Deutscher Prize 2019*

Why Marxism? Why today? In the first introduction to Marxist literary criticism to be published in decades, Barbara Foley argues that Marxism continues to offer the best framework for exploring the relationship between literature and society.

She lays out in clear terms the principal aspects of Marxist methodology - historical materialism, political economy and ideology critique - as well as key debates, among Marxists and non-Marxists alike, about the nature of literature and the goals of literary criticism and pedagogy.

Foley examines through the empowering lens of Marxism a wide range of texts: from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey; from Frederick Douglass's 'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?' to Annie Proulx's 'Brokeback Mountain'; from W.B. Yeats's 'The Second Coming' to Claude McKay's 'If We Must Die'.

Acknowledgements
Prologue
PART I: MARXISM
1. Historical Materialism
Materialism
Production
Dialectics
Class
Base and Superstructure
Relative Autonomy
Mediation
Levels of Generality
2. Political Economy
Commodities
Commodity Fetishism
Labor Power and Exploitation
Surplus Value
Alienation
Capital
3. Ideology
Three Definitions of Ideology in Marx
Dominant Ideology
Relative Autonomy and Mediation Revisited
Ideology as Smorgasbord
Reification
Interpellation
Hegemony and Alternative Hegemony
PART II: LITERATURE
4. Literature and Literary Criticism
Defining Literature
Fictionality
Density
Depth
Concreteness and Particularity
Showing Not Telling
Defamiliarization
Universality
Empathy
Individuality
Group Identity
Formal Unity
Autonomy
Beauty
Greatness
5. Marxist Literary Criticism
Rhetoric and Interpellation
Ideology Critique
Symptomatic Reading
Humanism
Realism
Proletarian Literature and Alternative Hegemony
6. Marxist Pedagogy
Alienation
Rebellion
Nation
War
Money
Race and Racism
Gender and Sexuality
Nature
Mortality
Art
Notes
Bibliography
Index