Marx and Modern Fiction

On the premise that the total body of Karl Marx's writing is a richly rewarding source for literary criticism, Edward J. Ahearn offers here a concise overview of Marx's most important critiques and analyses, and then shows how these can illuminate a representative range of Western novels from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Ahearn outlines Marx's depiction of the bloody history of the development of capitalism and its relation to the alienation of the individual in a world increasingly dominated by the conflict between city and country and the conflict between capital and labor. He then explores other controversial and unsettling Marxist themes: religious estrangement, democratic values that justify exploitation, the latent slavery of the family, and the hostility caused by property, labor, class, commodities, money, and capital. Juxtaposing Austen's Pride and Prejudice with Flaubert's Madame Bovary, James's The Golden Bowl with Joyce's Ulysses, and Balzac's Old Goriot with Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Ahearn shows how our understanding of the novels can be enriched by analyzing them in terms of insights from Marx. He concludes by discussing Melville's Moby-Dick as a work that also evokes the global economic history of exploitation described by Marx.