Barbara Foley is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark. She has published widely in the fields of Marxist criticism, US literary radicalism, and African American literature. Her books include Marxist Literary Criticism Today (Pluto, 2019), Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (Duke University Press, 2010) and Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (University of Illinois Press, 2003).
Acknowledgements
Prologue
PART I: MARXISM
1. Historical Materialism
Materialism
Production
Dialectics
Class
Base and Superstructure
Relative Autonomy
Mediation
Levels of Generality
2. Political Economy
Commodities
Commodity Fetishism
Labor Power and Exploitation
Surplus Value
Alienation
Capital
3. Ideology
Three Definitions of Ideology in Marx
Dominant Ideology
Relative Autonomy and Mediation Revisited
Ideology as Smorgasbord
Reification
Interpellation
Hegemony and Alternative Hegemony
PART II: LITERATURE
4. Literature and Literary Criticism
Defining Literature
Fictionality
Density
Depth
Concreteness and Particularity
Showing Not Telling
Defamiliarization
Universality
Empathy
Individuality
Group Identity
Formal Unity
Autonomy
Beauty
Greatness
5. Marxist Literary Criticism
Rhetoric and Interpellation
Ideology Critique
Symptomatic Reading
Humanism
Realism
Proletarian Literature and Alternative Hegemony
6. Marxist Pedagogy
Alienation
Rebellion
Nation
War
Money
Race and Racism
Gender and Sexuality
Nature
Mortality
Art
Notes
Bibliography
Index
