German Realists in the Nineteenth Century

Georg Luk?cs was one of the most controversial Marxist philosophers ofthis century. In this book, however, he appears in another guise: as a literaryhistorian in the tradition of Sainte-Beuve and Belinsky, offering an advancedintroduction to one of the richest periods of European literature.These previouslyuntranslated essays - on Heinrich von Kleist, Joseph Eichendorff, Georg B?chner, Heinrich Heine, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe, and Theodor Fontane - were writtenbetween 1936 and 1950. They illuminate Luk?cs's enduring love of German literatureand his faith in the humanist tradition. In all of them, moreover, he can be seenactively intervening in the cultural debates of the time - on the role ofliterature, on the literary tradition in society, and on the relationship betweenliterature and politics.Although his defense of realism against the crudities ofsocialist realism is implicit throughout these essays, Luk?cs's main purpose was toilluminate the intellectual, historical, and literary context in which these greatwriters worked, to attain a fuller understanding of what they wrote, and also tosettle accounts with contemporary German critics who were attempting to create afascist pantheon.Rodney Livingstone, Reader in German at the University ofSouthampton, has edited and translated numerous works by Luk?cs, Theodor Adorno, andothers.