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This influential collection explores the pivotal texts and topics in the Marxist tradition. Ranging over questions of social theory, political theory, moral philosophy and literary criticism, it looks at the thought of Marx and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Lenin and Althusser. They include Geras's influential and widely-cited treatment of fetishism in Capital, his comprehensive review of recent debates on Marxism and justice, discussions on political organisation, revolutionary mass action and party pluralism, and a novel analysis of the literary power of Trotsky's writing. In close dialogue with common themes and arguments in the literature of revolutionary Marxism, Geras brings some of his persistent preoccupations to the fore; with the normative foundations and some of the epistemological assumptions of this tradition, with issues of socialist democracy, working class self-education and emancipation.
At a time of crisis and constitutional turmoil, literature itself acquired new functions and played a dynamic part in the fragmentation of religious and political authority.
Between March and May 1871, the Parisian Communards fought for a revolutionary alternative to the status quo grounded in a vision of internationalism, radical democracy and economic justice for the working masses that cut across national borders. The eventual defeat and bloody suppression of the Commune resonated far beyond Paris. In Britain, the Commune provoked widespread and fierce condemnation, while its defenders constituted a small, but vocal, minority. The Commune evoked long-standing fears about the continental ‘spectre’ of revolution, not least because the Communards’ seizure of power represented an embryonic alternative to the bourgeois social order. This book examines how a heterogeneous group of authors in Britain responded to the Commune. In doing so, it provides the first full-length critical study of the reception and representation of the Commune in Britain during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, showing how discussions of the Commune functioned as a screen to project hope and fear, serving as a warning for some and an example to others. Writers considered in the book include John Ruskin, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant, George Gissing, Henry James, William Morris, Alfred Austin and H.G. Wells. As the book shows, many, but not all, of these writers responded to the Commune with literary strategies that sought to stabilize bourgeois subjectivity in the wake of the traumatic shock of a revolutionary event. The book extends critical understanding of the Commune’s cultural afterlives and explores the relationship between literature and revolution.
Literature and Revolution by Leon Trotsky whith summary.Literature and Revolution is a classic work of literary criticism from the Marxist standpoint written by Leon Trotsky in 1924. By discussing the various literary trends that were around in Russia between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 Trotsky analyzed the concrete forces in society, both progressive as well as reactionary, that helped shape the consciousness of writers at the time.In the book, Trotsky also explained that since the dawn of civilization art had always borne the stamp of the ruling class and was primarily a vehicle that expressed its tastes and its sensibilities. Nonetheless, he went on to argue against the seemingly obvious conclusion that after a proletarian revolution the proletariat as a ruling class should, therefore, strive to create its own proletarian art as many at the time thought.
This study investigates German and English revolutionary literary discourse between 1819 and 1848/49. Marked by dramatic socioeconomic transformations, this period witnessed a pronounced transnational shift from the concept of political revolution to one of social revolution. Writing the Revolution engages with literary authors, radical journalists, early proletarian pamphleteers, and political theorists, tracing their demands for social liberation, as well as their struggles with the specter of proletarian revolution. The book argues that these ideological battles translated into competing "poetics of revolution." (Series: Kulturgeschichtliche Perspektiven - Vol. 10)
