Marxist and Historicist Criticism
Marxist and historicist criticism reads literature in relation to history, class, and ideology, treating texts as products and agents of their social conditions.
Definition
A grouping of critical approaches that interpret literature through its relations to historical, economic, and ideological forces rather than as an autonomous aesthetic object.
Scope
This area covers Marxist literary theory, from base-and-superstructure models to more dialectical accounts of ideology and form, and the historicist approaches, especially New Historicism and cultural materialism, that reconnected texts to their historical circumstances after formalism and poststructuralism. It treats the central concepts of ideology, the relation of literature to social and economic structures, and the methods used to situate texts in history.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How does literature relate to the economic and class structures of its society?
- In what sense do literary texts reproduce or contest ideology?
- How can a text be situated in the network of historical discourses and practices around it?
- Does attention to history determine, or merely contextualize, literary meaning?
Key theories
- Ideology and literary form
- The Marxist view, developed by Eagleton and others, that literary form is not neutral but bears the imprint of ideology and the social relations of its time, so that criticism must read form historically.
- The political unconscious
- Jameson's argument that narratives are 'socially symbolic acts' that imaginatively resolve real social contradictions, so interpretation must recover the repressed history encoded in form.
- Circulation of social energy
- Greenblatt's New Historicist account of how literary works exchange and circulate 'social energy' with other discourses and practices of their period, dissolving the boundary between text and context.
History
Marxist criticism developed from the writings of Marx and Engels through Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, Goldmann, Althusser, and Macherey. In the anglophone world Williams, Eagleton, and Jameson reshaped it from the 1970s. New Historicism, led by Greenblatt, and the related British 'cultural materialism' emerged in the 1980s, returning literary study to history while drawing on Foucault.
Debates
- Reflection versus mediation
- Whether literature simply 'reflects' its economic base or relates to it through complex mediations and relative autonomy, a question that separates cruder from more dialectical Marxist criticism.
Key figures
- Terry Eagleton
- Fredric Jameson
- Raymond Williams
- Stephen Greenblatt
Related topics
Seminal works
- eagletonmarxism1976
- jameson1981
- greenblatt1988
Frequently asked questions
- What is the base-and-superstructure model?
- It is the classical Marxist idea that an economic 'base' of productive relations conditions a 'superstructure' of culture, including literature; later Marxist critics complicated this with notions of mediation and relative autonomy.
- How does New Historicism differ from older Marxist criticism?
- New Historicism, influenced by Foucault, focuses on the circulation of discourses and power within a period rather than on class and economic determination, and tends to avoid a single explanatory base.