Development of Marxist Criticism
Although Marx and Friedrich Engels detailed theories of Socialism in the mid-nineteenth century, it was not until the 1920s that Marxist Literary Theory was systematized. The greatest impetus for this standardization came after the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia. The event instigated a change in belief around socialist ideals in government and society. While these ideals developed, socialist realism was accepted as the highest form of literature – a theory based on an art movement that depicted and glorified the proletariat’s struggle towards societal progress. These ideas guided both literary creation and official literary criticism in Russia, where works focused on the lives of the different classes. In the years since then, the Russian beliefs regarding literary theory have been modified to acknowledge that literary creation is a result of both subjective inspiration and the objective influence of the writer's surroundings. This system of belief relies on the social classes as well as the economic and political development of society. Thus, Marx’s theories intertwined expertly with the emerging ideologies of the new Russian movement and spread throughout the world.
Read more about this topic: Marxist Literary Criticism
Famous quotes containing the words development of, development, marxist and/or criticism:
“I could not undertake to form a nucleus of an institution for the development of infant minds, where none already existed. It would be too cruel.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For the child whose impulsiveness is indulged, who retains his primitive-discharge mechanisms, is not only an ill-behaved child but a child whose intellectual development is slowed down. No matter how well he is endowed intellectually, if direct action and immediate gratification are the guiding principles of his behavior, there will be less incentive to develop the higher mental processes, to reason, to employ the imagination creatively. . . .”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Why juggle with the term “bourgeois” in regard to Flaubert? You know quite well that in Flaubert’s sense it was not a class category. In other words, Flaubert in the eyes of Marx was a bourgeois in the Marxist sense, while Marx in Flaubert’s eyes was a bourgeois in a Flaubertian sense.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)