Marxist literary criticism

Marxist literary criticism interprets literature through class relations, ideology, and material conditions, examining how texts reflect, reproduce, or challenge social power.

Ideology: A system of ideas and representations through which people understand society and their place within it. Critics ask how a text naturalizes or unsettles dominant ideas.
Karl Marx: A nineteenth-century philosopher and political economist whose writings founded Marxism. His analysis of class and material production supplies the tradition’s conceptual starting points.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: Karl Marx’s 1852 analysis of the coup and political upheaval in France from 1848 to 1851. Its account of political representation and class forces became a model for historicist reading.
New Criticism: A twentieth-century method that analyzes literary works primarily through close attention to their internal structure and language. Its text-centered method contrasts with Marxist attention to social history and material conditions.
Cultural materialism: A critical approach that studies culture as material social production shaped by institutions and historical change. It develops Marxist literary criticism through attention to cultural practices and institutions.
Base and superstructure: A Marxist model relating economic production to political, legal, and cultural institutions. It frames debates about how economic relations shape literary production.
Friedrich Engels: A German philosopher and political theorist who collaborated with Karl Marx and wrote on social and economic change. His letters and commentary shaped early Marxist discussions of literary realism.
The German Ideology: A work by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developing a materialist account of history and ideology. Its claims about social production inform criticism of literature as historically produced consciousness.
Formalist literary criticism: An approach that studies literary devices and structures as the primary basis for interpreting a work. Marxist criticism asks how formal features relate to class and historical forces.
New Historicism: A literary approach that reads texts alongside the cultural and political practices of their historical moment. It shares historical contextualization while differing in its treatment of power and material explanation.

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