Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader is designed to give both students and lecturers a sense of the historical formation of a Marxist literary tradition. A unique compilation of principal texts in that tradition, it offers the reader new ways of reading Marxism, literature, theory, and the social possibilities of writing.

Represented in this reader are: Theodor W. Adorno, Louis Althusser, Aijaz Ahmad, Chida Amuta, Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Ernest Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Alex Callinicos, Christopher Caudwell, Terry Eagleton, Friedrich Engels, Lucien Goldmann, Fredric Jameson, V. I. Lenin, George Lukacs, Karl Marx, The Marxist-Feminist Collective, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Leon Trotsky, V. N. Volosinov, Galvano Della Volpe, Alick West, and Raymond Williams.