Literature and Revolution

Literature and Revolution by Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky penned this engaging book to elucidate the complex way in which art informs-- and can alter--our understanding of the world. This new edition features an essay and full explanatory notes from Brown University English professor William Keach.

"Re-reading Trotsky on literature forty years later is a delight. Literary critics of every persuasion could learn a great deal from this book. His defense of the classics and criticism of the avant-garde will surprise some, but when he mocks narcissism and says of the writer that he "is always preoccupied with his own self, tells stories about his own self, walks around his own self, sniffs at his own self, and licks his own self," many contemporary writers and columnists come to mind." Tariq Ali, author of Bush in Babylon

"Nothing in the postmodern canon comes close to the intellectual grandeur of Trotsky's vision of art and literature in an age of revolution, or his extraordinary meditations on the popular ownership of culture." Mike Davis, author of Dead Cities and City of Quartz

"It is splendid to have this magnificent classic of Marxist criticism available once more, and in so helpful and informative a version. Trotsky's rare combination of literary sensitivity and historical understanding gives the lie to all those for whom Marxist criticism can deal with modes of production but not with metaphors." Terry Eagleton

WILLIAM KEACH is professor of English at Brown University. He is editor of Coleridge's Complete Poems (Penguin, 1997) and author of Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics (Princeton, 2004).