Georg Lukács wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1914-1915, a period that also saw the conception of Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Letters, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Spengler's Decline of the West, and Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia. Like many of Lukács's early essays, it is a radical critique of bourgeois culture and stems from a specific Central European philosophy of life and tradition of dialectical idealism whose originators include Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Marx, Kierkegaard, Simmel, Weber, and Husserl.The Theory of the Novel marks the transition of the Hungarian philosopher from Kant to Hegel and was Lukács's last great work before he turned to Marxism-Leninism.

The Theory of the Novel: A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature

Politics & Social Sciences

Georg Lukács

Philosophy

M.I.T. Press

This collection of literary essays, which first appeared in Hungarian in 1910 when the author was only twenty-five, and in German the following year, was Georg Lukács' first published book. Many of the themes that dominate his later work are already to be found in these youthful writings—the idea of totality, the nature of form, the role of essayist and critic, the significance of gesture.

Soul and Form (English, German and Hungarian Edition)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

MIT Press]

Georg Lukács was one of the most controversial Marxist philosophers of this century. In this book, however, he appears in another guise: as a literary historian in the tradition of Sainte-Beuve and Belinsky, offering an advanced introduction to one of the richest periods of European literature. These previously untranslated essays - on Heinrich von Kleist, Joseph Eichendorff, Georg Büchner, Heinrich Heine, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe, and Theodor Fontane - were written between 1936 and 1950. They illuminate Lukács's enduring love of German literature and his faith in the humanist tradition. In all of them, moreover, he can be seen actively intervening in the cultural debates of the time - on the role of literature, on the literary tradition in society, and on the relationship between literature and politics. Although his defense of realism against the crudities of socialist realism is implicit throughout these essays, Lukács's main purpose was to illuminate the intellectual, historical, and literary context in which these great writers worked, to attain a fuller understanding of what they wrote, and also to settle accounts with contemporary German critics who were attempting to create a fascist pantheon.

German Realists in the Nineteenth Century

Livingstone, Rodney

Gaines, Jeremy

Keast, Paul

History

Mit Pr

This is the first time one of the most important of Lukács' early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923, has been made available in English. The book consists of a series of essays treating, among other topics, the definition of orthodox Marxism, the question of legality and illegality, Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist, the changing function of Historic Marxism, class consciousness, and the substantiation and consciousness of the Proletariat. 
Writing in 1968, on the occasion of the appearance of his collected works, Lukács evaluated the influence of this book as follows:
"For the historical effect of History and Class Consciousness and also for the actuality of the present time one problem is of decisive importance: alienation, which is here treated for the first time since Marx as the central question of a revolutionary critique of capitalism, and whose historical as well as methodological origins are deeply rooted in Hegelian dialectic. It goes without saying that the problem was omnipresent. A few years after History and Class Consciousness was published, it was moved into the focus of philosophical discussion by Heidegger in his Being and Time, a place which it maintains to this day largely as a result of the position occupied by Sartre and his followers. The philologic question raised by L. Goldmann, who considered Heidegger's work partly as a polemic reply to my (admittedly unnamed) work, need not be discussed here. It suffices today to say that the problem was in the air, particularly if we analyze its background in detail in order to clarify its effect, the mixture of Marxist and Existentialist thought processes, which prevailed especially in France immediately after the Second World War. In this connection priorities, influences, and so on are not particularly significant. What is important is that the alienation of man was recognized and appreciated as the central problem of the time in which we live, by bourgeois as well as proletarian, by politically rightist and leftist thinkers. Thus, History and Class Consciousness exerted a profound effect in the circles of the youthful intelligentsia."

History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics

The MIT Press

Georg Lukács wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1914-1915, a period that also saw the conception of Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Letters, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Spengler's Decline of the West, and Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia. Like many of Lukács's early essays, it is a radical critique of bourgeois culture and stems from a specific Central European philosophy of life and tradition of dialectical idealism whose originators include Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Marx, Kierkegaard, Simmel, Weber, and Husserl.
The Theory of the Novel marks the transition of the Hungarian philosopher from Kant to Hegel and was Lukács's last great work before he turned to Marxism-Leninism.

The Theory of the Novel

This collection of literary essays, which first appeared in Hungarian in 1910 when the author was only twenty-five, and in German the following year, was Georg Lukacs' first published book. Many of the themes that dominate his later work are already to be found in these youthful writings—the idea of totality, the nature of form, the role of essayist and critic, the significance of gesture.

Soul and Form

Marxism and Human Liberation

Delta/Dell

Solzhenitsyn

Merlin Press

These essays celebrates and defend the tradition of European literature that runs from Balzac, through Tolstoy and Stendhal, to Zola and beyond.

Studies in European Realism: A Sociological survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gonki and others

The Merlin Press

The Meaning of Contemporary Realism

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Books by Georg Lukács