Book Reviews Criticism Editors
Criticism Volume 19 | Issue 3 Article 5 1977 Book Reviews Criticism Editors Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism Recommended Citation Editors, Criticism (1977) "Book Reviews," Criticism: Vol. 19: Iss. 3, Article 5. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol19/iss3/5 to Book Reviews Karl Marx and World Literature by S. S. Prawer. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 197.6. Pp. xii + 446. $19.50. As "orthodox" Anglo-Saxon criticism continues to run out of intellectual capital, some more ambitious, systematic and comprehensive critical method seems increasingly in demand. Of the various candidates for this role structuralism, Marxism, semiotics, stylistics, psychoanalysis and the like Marxism is currently enjoying rather a good press. In the United States, there is the work of men like Fredric Jameson and Stephen Morawski, as well as the increasingly potent intervention of the Marxist Literary Group; in Britain, the para-Marxist writings of Raymond Williams have influenced (if. only, on occasions, by critical reaction) a growing band of younger, quasi-Althusserian aestheticians who look anxiously to Europe for a literary science which might supplant their own dismal native heritage of myopic empiricism. In all of this, Marx's own writings on literature h~ve a critical, if not central, importance. And there have been some valuable compendia of such work: .Mikhail Lifshitz's classical compilation of Marx and Engels on literature and art, for example, or, more peripherally, Peter Demetz's deeply tendentious Marx, Engels and the Poets. More recently, Lee Baxandall and Stephan Morawski have provided us with a convenient, if curiously organised, record of Marx and Engels's literary comments, in the first volume of the projected DOMA series (Documents on Marxist Aesthetics).
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