Christopher Pawling has written an analysis of Christopher Caudwell's Marxist theory of literature. Caudwell was an English writer and thinker who died in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 at the age of 29. He wrote "Illusion and Reality" and "Romance and Realism". This book examines Caudwell's functionalist approach to art, his materialist account of the origins and development of poetry and the "inner" life of the poet. One of the main tasks of this study is to suggest that Caudwell has, paradoxically, failed to gain the recognition he deserves precisely because of his strengths, rather than his weaknesses. His ideas are often compared to Georg Lukacs, and like most Communist thinkers of the Thirties, Caudwell's judgements are seen to be influenced by an official party line which sometimes seems to be more concerned with forcing culture to develop in a certain political direction than understanding its internal aesthetic dimension - in fact he is seen not to hold with the notion of art as propaganda. There is a chapter on epistemology and the novel and the book concludes with an estimate of Caudwell's significance today.
- ISBN10 0333409531
- ISBN13 9780333409534
- Publish Date November 1989 (first published 1 January 1989)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 8 April 1992
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Palgrave Macmillan
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 216
- Language English