Alain Touraine
(1925–)Frenchpost-Marxist sociologist with a strong interest in social movements and the possibility of people-led politics. Born in the wealthy seaside resort town of Hermanville-sur-Mer in ...
Antonio Negri
(1933–)Italian*Marxistpolitical philosopher best known for his collaborative writings with Michael Hardt. A measure of his significance may be gauged from Michel Foucault's remark in 1980 that Negri ...
Bertolt Brecht
(1898–1956),German dramatist and poet who emigrated to the US during the Fascist period, then settled in 1949 in East Berlin. His early plays show kinship with Expressionism. Die Dreigroschenoper ...
Christopher Caudwell
(pseudonym of Christopher St John Sprigg) (1907–37),Marxist literary critic. He published poems, novels and many books on aircraft, but is known for his critical works Illusion and Reality (1937) and ...
commodity
A standardized good, which is traded in bulk and whose units are interchangeable. Commodities are mostly the output of the primary sector, that is, agriculture and mining, or semi-processed products. ...
criticism from 1940
The number of publications on the Brontës has doubled nearly every decade since 1940, the vast majority being interpretations of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights; Villette and Shirley have also ...
cultural materialism
[Th]The theory of cultural causation in which technology, economics, and environment are considered the independent variables.
deconstructionist approaches
The term deconstruction refers to a philosophy of language pioneered by Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) and to a school of literary criticism derived from that philosophy. The multi-layered text of ...
E. P. Thompson
(1924–93)Historian, born in Oxford and educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; for many years (1948–65) an extramural lecturer at Leeds University. His works include an influential study of ...
Edward Soja
(1941–)American*Marxistgeographer. Soja obtained a PhD from Syracuse University for a thesis on urban planning in Kenya. His early work focused on Africa. However, it is for his later work on Los ...
Eric Olin Wright
(1947–)American*Marxistsociologist. Born in Kansas, Wright did undergraduate studies at Harvard and Oxford. He completed a PhD in sociology at Berkeley in 1976. He then took a position at the ...
feminist criticism
A modern tradition of literary commentary and polemic devoted to the defence of women's writing or of fictional female characters against the condescensions of a predominantly male literary ...
Fredric Jameson
(1934–)Marxist cultural critic. Born in Cleveland Ohio, Jameson was educated at Haverford College and Yale University. He is renowned for his landmark essay, ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of ...
Friedrich Engels
(1820–95)German socialist and political philosopher, resident chiefly in England from 1842. The founder of modern communism with Karl Marx, he collaborated with him in the writing of the Communist ...
Gayatri Spivak
(1942–)Indian-born postcolonial, post-structuralist, Marxistliterary critic and theorist. The daughter of middle-class parents, she was born in Calcutta at a time when India was still part of the ...
György Lukács
(1885–1971)Hungarian Marxist philosopher. Lukács was briefly a minister in the Hungarian government in 1919 and again in 1956, although he spent years in exile in Russia. Lukács saw in Marxism the ...
Henri Lefebvre
(1901–91)French*Marxistphilosopher and sociologist. Lefebvre published 70 books in his lifetime on an incredibly wide array of topics, and is generally regarded as one of the great theoreticians of ...
ideology
Any wide-ranging system of beliefs, ways of thought, and categories that provide the foundation of programmes of political and social action: an ideology is a conceptual scheme with a practical ...
Karl Popper
(1902–94).British (originally Austrian) philosopher, whose considerable reputation rests on his philosophy of science and his political philosophy. In his early work he was associated with the ...
Kenneth Burke
(1897–1986),literary and philosophic critic, whose books include Counter-Statement (1931); Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (1935), a philosophic investigation of the evolution of ethical ...
