Romance and Realism: A Study in English Bourgeois Literature (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780691647531)

Christopher Caudwell was the pseudonym of Christopher St. John Sprigg, a British journalist and professional writer who became an important philosopher and critic in the 1930's, author of Illusion and Reality and Studies in a Dying Culture.

In the mid-thirties Caudwell joined the Communist Party; he died in 1937 in the defense of Madrid, leaving the manuscript of Romance and Realism unpublished. This short but comprehensive book is a Marxist interpretation of English literature from Shakespeare to Spender. The author follows the course of English history-the end of feudalism, the age of exploration, the rise of the common man, industrialization, science- producing his particular synthesis of literature as a subjective experience (romance) and as a response to society (realism). The major writers and movements of English literature are discussed, often with brilliant observations.

Romance and Realism is important as Marxist criticism, as a reflection of the acrid definitions of the writers of the thirties (including Auden, Orwell, C. Day Lewis), and as the highly personal view of a talented critic.

Originally published in 1971.

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Author: Christopher Caudwell
ISBN-10: 0691647534
ISBN-13: 9780691647531
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Language: English
Published: 04/19/2016
Pages: 150
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.86lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.38d