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220 ENGLISH STUDIES

There are also three important, though less immediately related, factors:
8 The so-called ‘cultural revolution’ which has manifested itself in Western
societies since the early 1960s. These extremely heterogeneous movements have
yielded, among other things, ‘theories’ attempting to deal with ‘the politics of
culture’ and to relate art/life, literature/politics, avant garde/politics, culture/
ideology. This climate has been exceedingly favourable to a renewed interest in
the social and political dimensions of art and literature.
9 A shift in the whole intellectual universe of the social sciences away from
positivistic and quantitative approaches and towards phenomenology,
structuralism, Marxism, ‘critical theory’ and so on. This has promoted, in turn, a
renewed interest in such hitherto marginal fields as ‘the sociology of literature’,
‘the sociology of art’, ‘the sociology of culture’.
10 A quite remarkable general interest in theory, marked especially by the
slow, uneven, but significant way in which Marxism has penetrated English
intellectual life in recent years. This intellectual shift parallels political and
historical tendencies which cannot be further developed here. One convenient
signpost is the translation into English of some key Marxist theoretical texts (for
example, Marcuse’s early essays, Goldmann’s Human Sciences and Philosophy,
Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Althusser’s For Marx and Reading Capital,
Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy, Sartre’s Problem of Method, Reich’s Mass
Psychology of Fascism, selections from Marx’s Grundrisse).

Approaches from within literary criticism
The dehistoricizing of the text has had a specific influence on literary-critical
concepts of literature as a social phenomenon, yet within that tradition equally
sophisticated positions can retain enormous differences of emphasis. As
instances we cite Northrop Frye’s essay on ‘The social context of literary
criticism’, and F.R.Leavis’s ‘Literature and Society’. Both, it should be noted,
2
define themselves explicitly against the Marxist approach (thereby negatively
confirming the argument advanced by Tom and Elizabeth Burns that ‘the genesis
of the concern with literature…as a social institution, lies in Marxism’). Frye
3
acknowledges that this is a serious issue in criticism; and, after reviewing a
number of approaches and finding them unsatisfactory, he remarks: ‘I wanted a
historical approach to literature, but an approach that would be or include a
genuine history of literature, and not the assimilating of literature to some other
kind of history.’ Via such concepts as ‘conventions’, ‘genres’ and then
‘archetypes’ and ‘myths’, Frye finds his way to an
historical overview, on the basis of what is inside literature rather than
outside it. Instead of fitting literature deterministically into a prefabricated

* This chapter is an extract from WPCS 4 (1973).