Historical Novel

Georg Lukács (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, The Historical Novel, in 1937. Beginning with the novels of Sir Walter Scott, The 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. Lukács devotes his final chapter to the anti-Nazi fiction of Germany and Austria.

"Concentrating primarily on the 19th century, Lukács offers brilliant reflections on Scott, Hugo, Tolstoy, and Flaubert, the methods of creating a feeling of historical reality, the tradition of epic, the use of the past by the rising bourgeoisie, the negative influence of naturalism, and the place of overt ideology."—Washington Post Book World

Georg Lukács’s works include The Theory of the Novel (1920), The History of Class Consciousness (1923), Studies in European Realism (1948), and The 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), The Prison-House of Language (1972), The Political Unconscious (1981), and Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).