Every so often I am contacted by people asking for advice on what to read. So I thought it might be helpful to publish a reading list of Marxist art theory. This is after all one of the less well-known branches of Marxist theory, and many of its key works are unknown even to well-read Marxists.
This blog already has a Bibliography, but that is more expansive and is being added to slowly over time. Here is a bald list, which cannot of course be exhaustive. I will add more titles to it as I think of them. Only works available in English are listed.
Marx and Engels
Ed. Baxandall, Lee and Morawski, Stefan: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Literature and Art (anthology, 1973)
Engels, Friedrich: Letter to Ferdinand Lassalle (18 May 1859)
Engels, Friedrich: Letter to Minna Kautsky (26 November 1885)
Engels, Friedrich: Letter to Margaret Harkness (April 1888)
Engels, Friedrich: Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany (article, 1844)
Marx, Karl: discussion of Eugène Sue from The Holy Family (1845)
Marx, Karl: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (first pub. 1932)
Marx, Karl: Letter to Ferdinand Lassalle (19 April 1859)
Other ‘classical’ Marxists
Gramsci, Antonio: The Prison Notebooks (1929–1935)
Lenin, Vladimir: Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution (article, 1908)
Lenin, Vladimir: On Literature and Art (anthology, 1967)
Lunacharsky: On Literature and Art (anthology, 1965)
Mao Zedong: Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature (1942)
Plekhanov: Art and Social Life (pamphlet, 1912)
Trotsky, Leon: Literature and Revolution (1924)
Trotsky, Leon: Art and Revolution: Writings on Literature, Politics and Culture (1970)
Marxist art history
Antal, Frederick: Florentine Painting and its Social Background (1948)
Berger, John: Art and Revolution (1969)
Childe, Gordon: What Happened in History (1942)
Childe, Gordon: Man Makes Himself (1936)
Hauser, Arnold: A Social History of Art, 4 vols (1951)
Klingender, Francis: Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947)
Other works
Adorno, Theodor: The Culture Industry (1991)
Adorno, Theodor: Aesthetic Theory (1970)
Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max: Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
Arvon, Henri: Marxist Esthetics (1970)
Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)
Bennett, Tony: Formalism and Marxism (1979)
Berger, John: Ways of Seeing (1972)
Brecht, Bertolt: Against Georg Lukács
Caudwell, Christopher: Illusion and Reality (1937)
Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
Demetz, Peter: Marx, Engels and the Poets (1967)
Eagleton, Terry: Criticism and Ideology (1976)
Eagleton, Terry: Literary Theory (1983)
Eagleton, Terry: Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)
Fischer, Ernst: Art Against Ideology (1966)
Fischer, Ernst: The Necessity of Art (1959)
Goldmann, Lucien: The Hidden God (1964)
Hauser, Arnold: The Sociology of Art (1974)
Ed. Hemingway, Andrew: Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left (2006)
Jameson, Fredric: Marxism and Form (1971)
Klingender, Francis: Marxism and Modern Art (pamphlet, 1975)
Laing, Dave: The Marxist Theory of Art (1978)
Ed. Lang, Berel and Williams, Forest: Marxism and Art: Writings in Aesthetics and Criticism (anthology, 1972)
Lifschitz: The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (1933)
Lukács, György: The Historical Novel (1937)
Lukács, György: Realism in the Balance 1938
Lukács, György: Studies in European Realism (1950)
Lukács, György: Writer and Critic (1970)
Macherey, Pierre: A Theory of Literary Production (1978)
Marcuse, Herbert: The Aesthetic Dimension (1977)
O’Flinn, Paul: Them and Us in Literature (1975)
Prawer, S.S.: Karl Marx and World Literature (1976)
Raphael, Max: The Demands of Art (1968)
Raphael, Max: Proudhon, Marx, Picasso (1933)
Rose, Margaret: Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx & the Visual Arts (1984)
Sánchez-Vásquez, Adolfo: Art and Society: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics (1973)
Ed. Solomon, Maynard: Marxism and Art (anthology, 1973)
Voloshinov, Valentin: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929)
Voronsky, Aleksandr: Art as the Cognition of Life: Selected Writings (1911–1936)
Ed. Willett, John: Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (1964)
Williams, Raymond: Marxism and Literature (1977)
2 comments:
Trotsky's famous and respected work "Literature and revolution" is dedicated to the Bulgarian Christian Rakovsky - one of the most prominent participants in the Second International, one of the chief founders of Bulgarian and Rumanian Socialdemocratic Parties (later turned into communist ones), the man who established Soviet power in Ukraine during the Russian Civil war, one of the eminent diplomats of the 20-ties and, alongside with Trtsky, one of the leaders of antistalinist opposition in the late 20-ies and 30-ies and one of the last members of the repressed opposition who did not want to repent to Stalin, even under pain of death, and later one of the accused during the Moscow trials.He payed with his life for being loyal to real sociatist and humanist values during times of repression and fear. I think this is more than enough for him to be admired. Moreover, he is a compatriot of mine! :)
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