Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
This book develops a Marxist theory of literary style. The first part explains why Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson came to see style as central to political criticism. It delineates the historical and conceptual preconditions for the emergence of a ‘politics of style’, and uncovers an underground current of stylistics within the Marxist tradition from Marx to Barthes. The second part sets out precisely what each thinker has written on style and demonstrates how this came to figure in their overall intellectual and political projects, focusing above all on a detailed reconstruction of Williams’s best-known concept, the ‘structure of feeling’. Finally, the third part sets out an independent theory of style and makes an ambitious attempt to establish it as a foundational element of a new Marxist poetics.
Price: $166.00
Pages: 280
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Historical Materialism Book Series
Publication Date:
06 October 2016
ISBN: 9789004287617
Format: Hardcover
"From now on, anyone entering the field of Marxist literary theory will have to take account of Daniel Hartley’s seminal work. He is Raymond Williams’s true successor, and he has gone further than his master, by developing Williams’s intuition of style as a social relationship into a comprehensive and systematic theory of literary style. In so doing, he has solved the conundrum posed by the concept of style, the contradiction between its collective (rococo style, modern style, etc.) and its irredeemably individual (le style c’est l’homme) characteristics. This is his first book, but it is already a monument." – Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Professor of English, University of Paris, Nanterre
"Hartley's is an innovative and ambitious attempt to ground Marxist aesthetics in the micropoetics of style study and linguistic analysis. Williams certainly comes off better here than Eagleton or myself; but too bad for us! The book produces timely new problems and proposes impressive new (or renewed) projects. Its intelligence and energy mark Hartley's as an authoritative new voice and reinvigorate a Marxist literary criticism too often pronounced unfashionable in the postmodern era." – Fredric Jameson, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies
"Hartley's is an innovative and ambitious attempt to ground Marxist aesthetics in the micropoetics of style study and linguistic analysis. Williams certainly comes off better here than Eagleton or myself; but too bad for us! The book produces timely new problems and proposes impressive new (or renewed) projects. Its intelligence and energy mark Hartley's as an authoritative new voice and reinvigorate a Marxist literary criticism too often pronounced unfashionable in the postmodern era." – Fredric Jameson, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies
Daniel Hartley (Ph.D., 2014) studied at the University of Cardiff, the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen. He is currently Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on Marxist theory and contemporary literature.