num_pages: 184
description: Gyrgy Lukcs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher writer and literary critic who shaped mainstream European Communist thought. Soul and Form was his first book published in 1910 and it established his reputation treating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the works of Plato Kierkegaard Novalis Sterne and others. By isolating the formal techniques these thinkers developed LukAcs laid the groundwork for his later work in Marxist aesthetics a field that introduced the historical and political implications of text.For this centennial edition John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis add a dialogue entitled On Poverty of Spirit which LukAcs wrote at the time of Soul and Form and an introduction by Judith Butler which compares LukAcs's key claims to his later work and subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an afterword Terezakis continues to trace the LukAcsian system within his writing and other fields. These essays explore problems of alienation and isolation and the curative quality of aesthetic form which communicates both individuality and a shared human condition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form the history that form implies and the historicity that form embodies. Taken together they showcase the breakdown in modern times of an objective aesthetics and the rise of a new art born from lived experience.
language: French
title: Soul and Form
publisher: Merlin Press Limited