Essays on Marxist Criticism

Marxist critisism is a form of cultural criticism that applies Marxist theory to the interpretation of cultural texts.

Marxist criticism places a literary work within the context of class and assumptions about class. A premise of Marxist criticism is that literature can be viewed as ideological, and that it can be analyzed in terms of a Base/Superstructure model. Economic means of production within society account for the base. Human institutions and ideologies that produce art and literary texts comprise the superstructure. Marxist criticism thus emphasizes class, socioeconomic status, power relations among various segments of society, and the representation of those segments.

Several concepts are indispensable for Marxist criticism: class, ideology, alienation, base and superstructure.

Terry Eagleton (Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)), Fredric Jameson (Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious (1981)), Lukács (History and Class Consciousness (1923)), Pierre Macherey (A Theory of Literary Production (1978)), Raymond Williams.

Karl Marx was a 19th century German thinker most famous for developing a notion of communism in The Communist Manifesto. His notion of communism was not simply a utopia presented in a vacuum, it was a political program meant to critique the social conditions of capitalism.