Marxism and Form:
20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature
Fredric Jameson

One of Princeton University Press's Notable Centenary Titles.

Paper | 1974 | $32.50 / £22.95
432 pp.

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For more than thirty years, Fredric Jameson has been one of the most productive, wide-ranging, and distinctive literary theorists in the United States and the Anglophone world. Marxism and Form provided a pioneering account of the work of the major European Marxist theorists--T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Jean-Paul Sartre--work that was, at the time, largely neglected in the English-speaking world. Through penetrating readings of each theorist, Jameson developed a critical mode of engagement that has had tremendous in.uence. He provided a framework for analyzing the connection between art and the historical circumstances of its making--in particular, how cultural artifacts distort, repress, or transform their circumstances through the abstractions of aesthetic form.

Jameson's presentation of the critical thought of this Hegelian Marxism provided a stark alternative to the Anglo-American tradition of empiricism and humanism. It would later provide a compelling alternative to poststructuralism and deconstruction as they became dominant methodologies in aesthetic criticism.

One year after Marxism and Form, Princeton published Jameson's The Prison-House of Language (1972), which provided a thorough historical and philosophical description of formalism and structuralism. Both books remain central to Jameson's main intellectual legacy: describing and extending a tradition of Western Marxism in cultural theory and literary interpretation.

This book has been translated into:

• Turkish

Another Princeton book by Fredric Jameson:

• The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism.

Subject Area:

• Comparative Literature

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For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Paper: $32.50 ISBN13: 978-0-691-01311-4

For customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India
Paper: £22.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-01311-4

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File created: 11/4/2009

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