The Historical Novel

Abstract

Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) is now recognized as one of the most innovative and best-informed literary critics of the twentieth century. Trained in the German philosophic tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, he escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing to the Soviet Union in 1933. There he faced a new set of problems: Stalinist dogmatism about literature and literary criticism. Maneuvering between the obstacles of censorship, he wrote and published his longest work of literary criticism, Historical Novel, in 1937. Beginning with the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Historical Novel documents the evolution of a genre that came to dominate European fiction in the years after Napoleon. The novel had reached a point at which it could be socially and politically critical as well as psychologically insightful.Lukacs devotes his final chapter to the anti-Nazi fiction of Germany and Austria. Georg Lukacs' works include Theory of the Novel (1920), History of Class Consciousness (1923), Studies in European Realism (1948), and Young Hegel (revised edition, 1954). Fredric Jameson is William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of the Graduate Program in Literature, and Director of the Duke Center for Critical Theory at Duke University. He is the author of many articles and books, including Marxism and Form (1971), Prison-House of Language (1972), Political Unconscious (1981), and Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).