After Marx

Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century

Colleen Lye, Christopher Nealon

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781108489287
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108802086
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

After Marx:Literature, Theory and Value demonstrates the importance of Marxist literary and cultural criticism for an era of intersectional politics and economic decline. The volume includes fresh approaches to reading poetry, fiction, film and drama, from Shakespeare to contemporary literature, and shows how Marxist literary criticism improves our understanding of racial capitalism, feminist politics, colonialism, deindustrialization, high-tech labor, ecological crisis, and other issues. A key innovation of the volume's essays is how they attend to Marx's theory of value. For Marx, capitalist value demands a range of different kinds of labor as well as unemployment. This book shows the importance of Marxist approaches to literature that reach beyond simply demonstrating the revolutionary potential or the political consciousness of a 19th-century-style industrial working class. After Marx makes an argument for the twenty-first century interconnectedness of widely different literary genres, and far-flung political struggles.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Marxist Literary Study and the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
• Chapter 1 Black Marxism and the Antinomies of Racial Capitalism
• Chapter 2 Eco-Criticism and Primitive Accumulation in Indigenous Studies
• Chapter 3 Screening Insurrection: Marx, Cinema, Revolution
• Chapter 4 Marxist Ecology and Shakespeare
• Chapter 5 There Is No ''More Commodification'': Periodizing Capitalist Transformation
• Chapter 6 The Irreconcilable: Marx after Literature
• Chapter 7 The Rise and Fall of the English-Language Literary Novel since World War II
• Chapter 8 Literature and the State
• Chapter 9 Post-Soviet Aesthetics
• Chapter 10 Lu Xun's Literary Revolution in Chinese Marxism
• Chapter 11 Latin American Literature and Dependency Theory Today
• Chapter 12 Industry Culture: Labor and Technology in Marxist Critical Theory
• Chapter 13 In Service to Capital: Theater and Marxist Cultural Theory
• Chapter 14 Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds: Literary Study and Marxist-Feminism
• Chapter 15 Poetry and Revolution
• Index