The end of the Soviet period, the vast expansion in the power and influence of capital, and recent developments in social and aesthetic theory, have made the work of Hungarian Marxist philosopher and social critic Georg Lukács more vital than ever.The very innovations in literary method that, during the 80s and 90s, marginalized him in the West have now made possible new readings of Lukács, less in thrall to the positions taken by Lukács himself on political and aesthetic matters. What these developments amount to, this book argues, is an opportunity to liberate Lukács's thought from its formal and historical limitations, a possibility that was always inherent in Lukács's own thinking about the paradoxes of form. This collection brings together recent work on Lukács from the fields of Philosophy, Social and Political Thought, Literary and Cultural Studies. Against the odds, Lukács's thought has survived: as a critique of late capitalism, as a guide to the contradictions of modernity, and as a model for a temperament that refuses all accommodation with the way things are.

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: Fundamental Dissonance Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall Part I: Paradoxes of Form 1. Temporalized Invariance: Lukács and the Work of Form, Yoon Sun Lee 2. How to Escape from Literature? Lukács, Cinema, and The Theory of the Novel, Timothy Bewes 3. Capitalist and Bourgeois Epics: Lukács, Abstraction and the Novel, David Cunningham 4. Typing Class: Classification and Redemption in Lukács's Political and Literary Theory, Patrick Eiden-Offe Part II: Life, History, Social Theory 5. Lukács sans Proletariat, or Can History and Class Consciousness be Re-historicized? Neil Larsen 6. Rethinking Reification, Andrew Feenberg 7. Justice and the Good Life in Lukács's History and Class Consciousness, Timothy Hall 8. Capitalist Life in Lukács, Stewart Martin Part III: Aesthetic Reframings 9. Art for Art's Sake and Proletarian Writing, Georg Lukács 10. The Historical and Political Context of Lukács's 'Art for Art's Sake and Proletarian Writing', Andrew Hemingway 11. 'Fascinating Delusive Light': Georg Lukács and Franz Kafka, Michael Löwy 12. The Historical Novel After Lukács, John Marx 13. Realism, Totality, and the Militant Citoyen: Or, What Does Lukács Have to Do With Contemporary Art? Gail Day Appendix 14. An Entire Epoch of Inhumanity (1964 Preface to Probleme des Realismus, III), Georg Lukács Contributors Index