 | THE MEANING OF CONTEMPORARY REALISM
Georg Lukacs
With a new foreword by Gary Day, Dept. of English, De Montfort University, Leicester.
Unlike most critics writing today George Lukacs was concerned with finding out what is really happening in the world. He wanted to understand the nature of society, how it seemed designed to distort rather than develop people's lives and how that could be remedied.
In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism Lukacs examines the work of a number of writers, including Kafka and Mann, in the context of an exploration of the differences between realism and modernism. He sees the modernist emphasis on the self as an attempt to assert the integrity of the individual in the face of the distortions of capitalism. But to account for a situation is one thing, to resolve it another, and this requires that we choose between realism and modernism.
In the final chapter Lukacs compares critical and socialist realism, arguing that only socialist realism is capable of describing the forces working towards socialism, forces that drive the working class.
Georg (György) Lukács, (1885-1971) is one of the most important literary critics and philosophers of the 20th century. His literary works include: The Historical Novel and Studies in European Realism. His History and Class Consciousness established his reputation as major Marxist theoretician. He served in Hungarian governments twice: once in the midst of the revolution in 1919, and again, as Minister of Culture, in the anti-Stalinist regime that emerged in 1956.
ISBN. 0850362504
2006 reprint with new foreword.
Price: £10.95
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