Soul And Form

Gyorgy Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher writer and literary criticwho shaped mainstream European Communist thought. Soul and Form was his firstbook pu... » 

Gyorgy Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher writer and literary criticwho shaped mainstream European Communist thought. Soul and Form was his firstbook published in 1910 and it established the intellectuals reputationtreating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the worksof Plato Kierkegaard Novalis Sterne and others. By isolating the formaltechniques these thinkers developed Lukacs laid the groundwork for his laterwork in Marxist aesthetics a field that introduced readers to the historicaland political implications of text.For this centennial edition the editors adda dialogue entitled On Poverty of Spirit which Lukacs wrote at the time ofSoul and Form and an introduction by Judith Butler which compares Lukacsskey claims to his later work along with subsequent movements in literarytheory and criticism. In an afterword Katie Terezakis continues to trace theLukacsian system within his writing and other fields. The essays themselvesexplore problems of alienation and isolation and the curative quality ofaesthetic form which communicates both individuality and a shared humancondition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form the historythat form implies and the historicity that form embodies. Taken togetherthese essays showcase the breakdown in modern times of an objectiveaesthetics and the rise of a new art born from lived experience. «