The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature

The Marxian Imagination is a fresh and innovative recasting of Marxist literary theory and a powerful account of the ways class is represented in literary texts.

Where earlier theorists have treated class as a fixed identity site, Markels sees class in more dynamic terms, as a process of accumulation involving many, often conflicting, sites of identity. Rather than examining the situations and characters explicitly identified in class terms, this makes it possible to see how racial and gender identities are caught up in the processes of accumulation that define class. Markels shows how a Marxian imagination is at work in a range of great literary works, often written by non-Marxists.

In a field notorious for its difficulty, it is also a remarkably accessible text. Its central arguments are constantly developed and tested against readings of important novels, ranging from Dickens’ Hard Times to Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible. It concludes with a telling critique of the work of the major Marxist literary theorists, Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson.

Contents

PART I: The Literary Representation of Class

1. A Marxian Imagination
2. Class in Dickens from Hard Times to Little Dorrit
3. Representing Class in the Realist Novel

PART II: Some Consequences for Critical Theory and Practice

1. “Socialism-Anxiety”: The Princess Casamassina and Its New York Critics
2. The Gramscian Ordeal of Meridel Le Sueur
3. Denying the Imagination in Marxian Cultural Studies: Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson

CODA: Imagining History in The Poisonwood Bible

Notes

Index

Julian Markels is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University, Columbus, and the author of The Pillar of the World: “Antony and Cleopatra” in Shakespeare’s Development and Melville and the Politics of Identity: From “King Lear” to “Moby Dick”.