AESTHETICS AND POLITICS

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. Here the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual thought. Frederic Jameson, author of The Political Unconsciousness and Marxism and Form, sums up the paradoxical lessons for art and criticism today in a thoughtful conclusion.