First published in 1976, Marxism and Literary Criticism is Terry Eagleton’s compact attempt to explain what a Marxist criticism does once you get beyond the caricature that literature merely “reflects” class society. 

Across four short chapters—literature and history; form and content; the writer and commitment; and the author as producer—Eagleton works through Marx and Engels, Lukács, Goldmann, Brecht, Benjamin and others to show how literary form, genre, authorship and aesthetic value are entangled with material history without being mechanically determined by it.

Eagleton is writing from within the intellectual confidence of 1970s Marxist criticism, before several later theoretical turns complicated the field. But the book remains clear about a problem that never really disappeared, in how difficult or minefield like it is to understand art as socially produced without reducing it to propaganda, sociology or ideological symptom. Short, argumentative and highly teachable, it is a good entry point into Marxist literary theory precisely because Eagleton keeps returning to the friction between aesthetic autonomy and political determination rather than pretending the contradiction can simply be solved.

Methuen & Co., London, 1983 reprint of the 1976 first edition. Paperback. Light shelf wear and minor rubbing to edges and corners; covers remain bright, binding sound, pages clean and unmarked.