This volume is an introduction to those works of Gyoergy Lukacs that have established him as a classic authority in literary criticism: his pre-Marxist The History of the Evolution of Modern Drama (1911), still not available in English, which Eva Corredor analyzes in the original Hungarian text and from which she provides extensive quotations in English; his Kantian collection of essays, Soul and Form (1910); his Hegelian The Theory of the Novel (1920); and his first Marxist work, History and Class Consciousness (1923), which best characterizes the Hungarian philosopher's problematic position between East and West. Lukacs's Marxist theories are studied in the texts written during his exile in Stalinist Russia but published much later: Studies in European Realism (1950), The Historical Novel (1955) and Realism in Our Time (1957). The approach to Lukacs's work is both selective, in the sense that the author chooses to introduce Lukacs's literary theories with a focus on his views of French literature, but also global, in that she integrates these theories in the totality of his intellectual development. At each phase, the true motive of Lukacs's interest in literature is revealed as a pretext to study reality. The detailed biographical data, up-to-date critical bibliography and helpful index contribute to the overall value of this work as a challenging and rewarding source of information on Gyoergy Lukacs's theories of literature.

Since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the validity of Marxism and Marxist theory has undergone intense scrutiny both within and outside the academy. In Lukacs After Communism, Eva L. Corredor conducts ten lively and engaging interviews with a diverse group of international scholars to address the continued relevance of Gyoergy Lukacs's theories to the post-communist era. Corredor challenges these theoreticians, who each have been influenced by the man once considered the foremost theoretician of Marxist aesthetics, to reconsider the Lukacsean legacy and to speculate on Marxist theory's prospects in the coming decades. The scholars featured in this collection-Etienne Balibar, Peter Burger, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Leenhardt, Michael Loewy, Roberto Schwarz, George Steiner, Susan Suleiman, and Cornel West-discuss a broad array of literary and political topics and present provocative views on gender, race, and economic relations. Corredor's introduction provides a biographical synopsis of Lukacs and discusses a number of his most important theoretical concepts. Maintaining the ongoing vitality of Lukacs's work, these interviews yield insights into Lukacs as a philosopher and theorist, while offering anecdotes that capture him in his role as a teacher-mentor.