Marxism and art : writings in aesthetics and criticism / Edited by Berel Lang and Forrest Williams.

I. The sources: 1. "Property and alienation" / Karl Marx -- 2. "Production and consumption" / Karl Marx -- 3."Real men and human ideas" / Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels -- 4. "Realism and didacticism" / Friedrich Engels -- 5. "Party organization and party literature" / V. I. Lenin -- "Proletarian culture and proletarian art" / Leon Trotsky -- 7. "Marxism in linguistics" / Josef Stalin -- 8. "On art of art's sake" / Gyorgii Plekhanov -- 9. "Art and the social evolution" / N. I. Bukharin -- 10. "On literature and art" / Mao Tse-tung -- 11. "On the correct handling of contradictions among the people" Mao Tse-tung --

II. The elements A. Theoretical concepts 12. "What is Aesthetics?" / G. A. Nedozchiwin -- 13. "The origins of art" / Ernst Fischer -- 14. "Materialism and art" / Umberto Barbaro -- 15. "Theoretical issues of a Marxist poetics" / Galvano della Volpe -- 16. "Beauty and bourgeois aesthetics" / Christopher Caudwell -- 17. "The artist and his conscience" / Jean-Paul Sartre -- 18. "On Socialist realism" / Bertolt Brecht -- 19. "Art as self-consciousness in man's development" / Gyorgy Lukacs -- B. On art history and criticism 20. "Genetic-structuralist method in history of literature" / Lucien Goldmann -- 21. "Remarks on the method of art history" / Frederick Antal -- 22. "Sociology of art" / Arnold Hauser -- "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" / Walter Benjamin --

[The elements, continued] C. Genres 24. "The organization of the arts" / Christopher Caudwell -- 25. "Theatre for pleasure and theatre for instruction" / Bertolt Brecht -- 26. "After Aeschylus" / George D. Thomson -- 27. "A dialectical approach in film form" / Sergei Eisenstein -- 28. "The historical novel of democratic humanism" / Gyorgy Lukacs -- D. Critical practice 29. "Alienation as the key to mannerism" / Arnold Hauser -- 30. "Feudalism and 'The Dream of the Red Chamber'" / Hsu Min -- 31. "On non-objective painting" / Bertolt Brecht -- 32. "Politics and the English language" / George Orwell -- 33. "Charles Dickens" / Franz Mehring -- 34. "My lady's visit" / Jan Kott -- 35. "Study of the first scene of Shakespeare's Coriolanus" / Bertolt Brecht --

"[T]he essays which follow should, taken together, contain some of the most germinal and sophisticated writings in contemporary aesthetics, criticism, and art history. We are trying to show that their appearance in the Marxist fold, or their bearing the imprint of Marxist thought, is no mere accident. These essays, moreover, should also exhibit the distinctive instruments which Marxist analysis offers to scholars and readers in the field who may not otherwise be aware of them. These aims to not imply, of course, a plea for general acceptance of the tenets of Marxism. The anthology claims, rather, that for anyone interested in the philosophical, critical and historical feature of art, Marxism provides a valuable entree." -- from the editors' introduction.