Marxism And Art : Essays Classic And Contemporary / Edited With Historical And Critical Commentary By Maynard Solomon

This anthology contains selections from the works of thirty-six authors,divided into seven sections. Section one—‘‘A Reader in Marxist Aes-thetics”—consists of a set of excerpts from the works of Marx and Engelsthat are pertinent to an understanding of Marxist philosophy, its goals, andits aesthetic assumptions. The arrangement of sections two and three—“The Second Generation” and “The Bolsheviks’”—is roughly chronologi-cal, bringing the development of Marxist approaches to the arts up to theearly 1930’s. Section four is concerned with the emergence of “Zhdanov-ism” as a dominant feature of Soviet Marxist artistic theory and attitudesfrom the mid-1930’s onward:the selections in this and the followingsection—“The Return to Marxist Humanism”—are largely devoted to acritique of Zhdanovism and to a number of attempts at retaining or re-establishing the humanist core of Marxist aesthetics.