| The central problem for Marxist literary criticism is the precise nature of the relationship between literature and society. There are three areas of theoretical inquiry implicit in this problem: the nature of literature, the nature of society, and the relationship between the two. The broad emphasis of this thesis is the contribution of Marxist theories of society to the development of a Marxist literary criticism. The thesis is divided into two parts: Part I is an introduction to the theoretical problem, and Part II consists of three studies in Marxist literary criticism. The first chapter explores the problem of the relationship between literature and society in broad terms, and focuses on two different approaches to society, those of Raymond Williams, a major British cultural theorist, and Louis Althusser, a French anti-humanist structuralist. The second chapter in Part I briefly discusses some of the issues in the humanist versus structuralist debate in Britain in the 1960's as background to the British literary debate discussed in Part II.;The second study, "Towards a Science of Literary Criticism," explores the contributions of Lucien Goldmann, Althusser and Pierre Macherey to a literary criticism based on a theory of ideology.;The third study examines the debate between Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton in the light of the preceding studies. This study concludes with a discussion of convergences that can be discerned both in the work of these two critics and more generally in humanist and structuralist theoretical work. (Abstract shortened by UMI.);The first study in Part II juxtaposes the theoretical concerns of Georg Lukacs and Walter Benjamin as demonstrated in selected works, and presents them as the opposing poles of The "nature versus science" problematic. |
