ABSTRACT
Before the late 1960s – the years that function as a watershed in this book – such questions were by the large majority of English and American literary academics thought to be irrelevant or even detrimental to reading and to interpretation. With only a few exceptions, critics had not much use for historical context and even less for politics. In this chapter on literature and politics I will focus on three major modes of political criticism that became a forceful presence in Anglo-American literary studies in the course of the 1970s: Marxism, feminism, and criticism that concerns itself with racial relations. In Marxist criticism social class and class relations function as central instruments of analysis, in feminist criticism the concept of gender is the crucial critical (and political) instrument, while in criticism concerned with racial relations the fundamental category is of course race. I should point out that the 1960s-to-1980s version of these critical approaches, to which I will limit myself in this chapter, are by current standards rather traditional. Literary theory and criticism would go through great changes under the impact of the literary-theoretical upheavals of the later 1970s and the 1980s – of the spectacular rise of poststructuralism. Still, the fairly traditional character of the Marxism, the feminism, and the race-oriented criticism that I will look at here in no way diminishes their importance: traditional perspectives still play an important and valuable role within the world of literary studies. It must be kept in mind, however, that there are newer versions of these and other critical approaches which have assimilated the poststructuralist thought that I will discuss in the next chapter and which continue political criticism from somewhat different perspectives. For strategic reasons, which will become clear in my discussion of feminism, I will first discuss Marxist literary criticism.
