Society, Politics, Literacy Theory and Criticism: Revisiting the British Marxist Classic of the 1930s

 The book, "Society, Politics, Literary Theory and Criticism" is a breakthrough in Marxist literary and cultural studies. It is the result of the author’s years of patient study, reflection and critical thinking. It centres on Christopher Caudwell, the Marxist literary and cultural thinker and critic of the turbulent British 1930s, who argued for commitment to Marxist integrative frame as a corrective to bourgeois anarchy in the realms of philosophy, science and literature, and also for ‘freedom’ and ‘spontaneity’ in every creative effort and, therefore, situated the hero, the poet and the saint at the ‘expanding edge’ of the dominant ‘illusions’ of their age-an anathema to the dominant Stalinist sociologism and collectivism of the period. Having conceived poetry as an organized triad of economic activity, organized emotion and human functions, the book studies poetry in its origins, growth, efflorescence and in its gradual marginalization with the emergence of the bourgeoisie and its art form, the novel after mid-18th century. The study is fully aware of Morgan, Malinovski and Plekhanov, but goes much beyond them. It explores how changing political climate influences aesthetic critical response. Freud-s instinctive man, the individual has been accepted, but his idea of culture as source of neurosis has been rejected, because cultural growth involves new openings which gratify instinctive desires. It studies beauty and truth not in vague Keastsean aesthetic sense, but in relation to society which generates them, and which the hero, the saint and the poet best express. There are also penetrating studies of such giants as G.B. Shaw, D.H. Lawrence and T.E. Lawrence in relation to dominant bourgeois illusion as individualism which is the cause of their fundamental sadness, escapism and artistic failures. There is a consistent plea for the artist as thinker rather than mere technician and for the critic as fully aware of the ideological, genotypical and sociological dimensions of the artwork. Thus, the book, though centred on Caudwell, looks much beyond him and the reader will find it both enlightening and thought-provoking.