The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature

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MIT Press, Jan 15, 1974 - Philosophy - 160 pages
Georg Lukács wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1914-1915, a period that also saw the conception of Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Letters, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Spengler's Decline of the West, and Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia. Like many of Lukács's early essays, it is a radical critique of bourgeois culture and stems from a specific Central European philosophy of life and tradition of dialectical idealism whose originators include Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Marx, Kierkegaard, Simmel, Weber, and Husserl.

The Theory of the Novel marks the transition of the Hungarian philosopher from Kant to Hegel and was Lukács's last great work before he turned to Marxism-Leninism.

 

Contents

Preface II
11
Integrated civilisations
29
The problems of a philosophy of the history of forms
40
The epic and the novel
56
The inner form of the novel
70
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About the author (1974)

Georg Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic.

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