Merlin Press Ltd. LITERARY CRITICISM

ESSAYS ON THOMAS MANN

by Georg Lukács

These essays, written over a number of decades, are intended to throw light
on the central problems of the work of Thomas Mann whom Lukács describes as "the last great bourgeois writer". Translated by Stanley Mitchell.

223x142 mm. 170 pp.
ISBN. 0850362385
1964 Paperback
Reprinted 2007
Price: £9.95

GOETHE AND HIS AGE

by Georg Lukács

Written in the 1930s and 1940s, these essays discuss Goethe's works, their role in German literature and the wider problems of the evolution of German culture and social thought. Translated by Robert Anchor.

223x142mm 260pp
ISBN. 0850362393
1979 Paperback
Price: £11.95

THE HISTORICAL NOVEL

by Georg Lukács

Studies of Scott, Goethe, Fenimore Cooper, Dickens, Manzoni, Tolstoy, and Mann.

'One of the permanent classics of criticism.' Raymond Williams: The Listener.

Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell.

223 x 142mm 364pp
ISBN. 0850363780
1962 Paperback

Rights: USA: University of Nebraska Press
Price: £10.95

SOLZHENITSYN

by Georg Lukács

Lukács hails Solzhenitsyn as the true heir to the socialist-realist writers of post-revolutionary Russia and as a major novelist on a world scale. In the first essay Lukács examines One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and shows how this novella fits into the tradition of classic literature from Homer onwards. In the second, larger section he discusses The First Circle and Cancer Ward and praises them more highly than any other twentieth-century writing.
Translated by William David Graf.

223x142mm 88pp
ISBN. 0850361435
1969 Hardback
Price: £9.95

SOUL AND FORM

by Georg Lukács

This influential collection, first published in 1911, established Lukács as a critic. Here he considers the role of the critical essay and its relation to great aesthetics and reviewing philosophers and writers, Plato, Novalis, Kierkergaard, Olsen, Storm, Stefan George, Charles-Louis Phillipe, Beer-Hofman, Lawrence Sterne, Paul Ernst.
Translated by Anna Bostock

223x142mm 138pp 176pp
ISBN. 0850362512
Paperback
Reprinted 2007

Price: £9.95

STUDIES IN EUROPEAN REALISM

by Georg Lukács

A sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and others. These essays celebrate the humanist tradition of European literature.
Translated by Edith Bone.

223x142mm 278pp
ISBN. 0850362113
1972/1950 Paperback
Rights: USA: Howard Fertig

Price: £8.95

THE THEORY OF THE NOVEL
A Historical-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature

by Georg Lukács
Translated by Anna Bostock

Lukács is a thinker and critic widely appreciated in cultural and literary studies of the twentieth century. This book considers the nature and development of the novel and anticipates its development. It is an essay of prophetic vision: Lukács writes: "anyone who wants to become more intimately acquainted with the prehistory of the important ideologies of the [nineteen] twenties and thirties ... will be helped by a critical reading of this book.

" It begins with a comparison of the historic conditions that gave rise to the epic and the novel. In the age of the novel the once known unity between man and his world has been lost and the hero has become an estranged seeker of the meaning of existence. Later Lukács offers a typology of the novel based on whether the hero struggles for a realisation of a meaningful idea, or withdraws from all action. The balance of these extreme forms the third possibility, and each type is exemplified. The book is not a study of artistic technicalities, but of man, history and art tied closely in their development. It is written in a lyrical style well rendered by the translation." Library Journal

214 x138mm 160pp
ISBN. 0850362369
Paperback
Reprinted 2003

See contents here ...

Price: £10.95

WRITER AND CRITIC AND OTHER ESSAYS

by Georg Lukács

"The work of art must ... reflect correctly and in proper proportion all important factors objectively determining the area of life it represents. It must so reflect these that this area of life becomes comprehensible from within and from without, re-experiencable, that it appears as a totality of life."
Edited and translated by Arthur Kahn.

Contents: Preface, Art and objective Truth, Marx and Engels on Aesthetics, The Ideal of the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois Aesthetics, Healthy or Sick Art?, Narrate or Describe?, The Intellectual Physiognomy in Characterization, The Writer and the Critic, Pushkin's Place in World Literature.

223x142mm 256pp
ISBN. 0850362377
Paperback
Reprinted 2007
Price: £11.95

THE ROMANTICS
England in a Revolutionary Age

by E.P. Thompson

Wordsworth and Coleridge dominate these essays, with associates like the radical poet and lecturer, John Thelwall, and influences such as Godwin and Rousseau. Foreword by Dorothy Thompson.
Contents: Education or experience; Disenchantment or Default; Wordsworth's Crisis; Benevolent Mr Godwin; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Hunting the Jacobin Fox; Appendix; Afterword.
214x134mm 242pp
0850364744
1997 Paperback
Rights: USA and Canada - The New Press
Price: £12.95