Reading list

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)