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September 2003

ISBN:
1-58367-097-1
$19.00 paper


160 pp.

Literary Studies

THE MARXIAN IMAGINATION

Representing Class in Literature

by Julian Markels

“Sophisticated theorizing and deft interpretations … A significant contribution to Marxist theory and the theory of the novel.”
— JIM PHELAN, Professor of English, Ohio State University and editor of Narrative

“An excellent work …. Literary critics, economists, and sociologists will find stimulating new approaches here to the vexed question of class in today’s changing world.”
— ANNETTE RUBINSTEIN, author of American Literature: Root and Flower and The Great Tradition in English Literature

“There are no books in this field as skilled, as beautifully written, as well-informed, and as fully and wonderfully accessible as The Marxian Imagination.”
— JAMES KINCAID, Aerol Arnold Professor of English, University of Southern California

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 Timesto 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.

Table of Contents
PART I: The Literary Representation of Class
Chapter One — A Marxian Imagination
Chapter Two — Class in Dickens from Hard Times to Little Dorrit
Chapter Three — Representing Class in the Realist Novel

PART II: Some Consequences for Critical Theory and Practice
Chapter Four — “Socialism-Anxiety”: The Princess Casamassina and Its New York Critics
Chapter Five — The Gramscian Ordeal of Meridel Le Sueur
Chapter Six — Denying the Imagination in Marxian Cultural Studies: Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson

CODA: Imagining History in The Poisonwood Bible

Notes
Index

About the Author
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.”

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