The politics of literary theory : an introduction to marxist criticism /

Goldstein's introduction reveals that Marxist criticism of literature has gone through the same phases as has criticism in general--New Critical, humanist, reader-oriented, phenomenological, structuralist, poststructuralist, and deconstructionist. After a perceptive critique of each phase in modern critical history, Goldstein sketches in the positions of Marxists who stayed within the limits of each particular critical "orthodoxy" and those who moved beyond it on the basis of clearer understanding of the political nature of literary interpretation. His analysis, which concludes with various readings of Hardy's Tess and Jude, illustrates how Marxist criticism can both benefit from, and offer a political critique of, different interpretive communities. After surveying the work of contemporary Marxists and feminists such as Terry Eagleton, Raymond Williams, Gayatri Spivak, Elaine Showalter, Fredric Jameson, Barbara Johnson, and others, Goldstein's argument for a poststructuralist version of Marxism is forcefully developed and illustrated in the chapter on Hardy. Highly recommended for both college and university libraries. D. D. Murdoch Rochester Institute of Technology