Abstract
One of the longest-running and most influential literary and cultural critical traditions of the modern period is Marxist literary theory. Marxist criticism began as an analysis of the capitalist political economy in the nineteenth century, as formulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and evolved into a theory of ideology, culture, representation, subjectivity and social change. While Marx and Engels did not develop a systematic literary theory, their ideas on historical materialism, the idea of class struggle, commodity production, alienation, ideology and social consciousness and the interconnection between social structures and social consciousness provided the theoretical basis for the development of later Marxist literary criticism. This essay outlines the nineteenth-century origins of Marxist literary theory, Russian Marxism, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, Louis Althusser, structural Marxism, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, feminist Marxism, postcolonial Marxism, and cultural studies. It claims that the Marxist theory of literature has undergone many metamorphoses in response to the different configurations of Capitalism. While classical Marxist criticism focused on class, labour, economic relations and ideology, more recent criticism included consideration of hegemony, language, discourse, gender, race, colonialism, culture, consumption, globalisation, ecology and technology. A contemporary examination of the different ways in which Marxists have approached the concept of neoliberalism, digital capitalism, platform economy, artificial intelligence, ecological crisis and cultural commodification are discussed in the essay's conclusion. It is not the application of nineteenth-century concepts to literature that makes literature "relevant" to Marxism, but its ability to historicize literature and to uncover the "material, ideological and power dynamics" in which it is created and interpreted.