ABSTRACT
Gramsci’s notes on the subject of art and literary criticism have been systematically analyzed and widely commented upon by Italian Marxist and non-Marxist scholars. They have influenced prominent historians of literature and Italian critics. However, partly because they are fragmentary and unfinished, and partly because they are polemical in nature and formulated in the context of specific problems of Italy’s literary history, they have remained untranslated and generally unknown outside Italy. To this, one has to add the fact that no systematic, objective treatment of Gramsci’s ideas on the subject of art and literary criticism has been developed. More than everything else, these notes have also become the object of a moot controversy between Marxist and non-Marxist aestheticians.
