'We shall speak. We shall sing. We shall shout.' This blazing autobiographical poem by the founder of the négritude movement became a rallying cry for decolonisation when it appeared in 1939. Following one man's return from Europe to his homeland of Martinique, it is a reckoning with the trauma of slavery and exploitation, and a triumphant anthem for Black identity, one which reclaims and remakes language itself. 'Nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time' André Breton 'A Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket, suns burst forth whirling and exploding' Jean-Paul Sartre 'The most influential Francophone Caribbean writer of his generation' Independent

The relationship between philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin and playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht was both a lasting friendship and a powerful intellectual partnership. Having met in the late 1920s in Germany, Benjamin and Brecht both independently minded Marxists with a deep understanding of and passionate commitment to the emancipatory potential of cultural practices continued to discuss, argue and correspond on topics as varied as Fascism and the work of Franz Kafka. Faced by the onset of the 'midnight of the century', with the Nazi subversion of the Weimar Republic in Germany and the Stalinist degeneration of the revolution in Russia, both men, in their own way, strove to keep alive the tradition of dialectical critique of the existing order and radical intervention in the world to transform it. In Understanding Brecht we find collected together Benjamin's most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor. Stimulated by Brecht's oeuvre and theorising his particular dramatic techniques-such as the famous 'estrangement effect'-Benjamin developed his own ideas about the role of art and the artist in crisis-ridden society. This volume contains Benjamin's introductions to Brecht's theory or epic theatre and close textual analyses of twelve poems by Brecht (printed in translation here) which exemplify Benjamin's insistence that literary form and content are indivisible. Elsewhere Benjamin discusses the plays The Mother, Terror and Misery of the Third Reich, and The Threepenny Opera, digressing for some general remarks on Marx and satire. Here we also find Benjamin's masterful essay "The Author as Producer" as well as an extract from his diaries that records the intense conversations held in the late 1930s in Denmark (Brecht's place of exile) between the two most important cultural theorists of this century. In these discussions, the two men talked of subjects as diverse as the work of Franz Kafka, the unfolding Soviet Trials, and the problems of literary work on the edge of international war.

Has any major thinker been more poorly understood than Karl Marx? Over the last 150 years, his name has been invoked in connection with everything from unemployment insurance to Hollywood to guerrilla wars. Any number of international movements have claimed his teachings as their inspiration. Time after time, authorities have proclaimed the death of Marx's theories while new and old audiences continue to draw vital insight from the works of the most important philosopher and economist of the industrial era. Ernst Fischer has crafted a brief, clear, and faithful exposition of Marx's main premises, with particular emphasis on historical context. This new edition of the English translation of 'Was Marx wirklich sagte' (1968) includes new contributions by John Bellamy Foster that sharpen Fischer's focus for today's readers. Also included are a biographical chronology, extracts from major works of Marx, and "Marx's Method," a valuable essay by the political economist Paul M. Sweezy.

Gy?rgy Lukacs 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, Luk?cs 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 Luk?cs wrote at the time of "Soul and Form," and an introduction by Judith Butler, which compares Luk?cs's key claims to his later work and subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an afterword, Terezakis continues to trace the Luk?csian 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.