The Marxist Premodern

by Bruce Holsinger (Editor), Ethan Knapp (Editor), Stephen H. Rigby (Contributor)

In classic Marxism, the Middle Ages represent something of a paradox: both a prelapsarian pastoral in which peasants are "bound to the soil" with the "guarantees of existence" offered by feudalism, and an expropriative economy that adumbrates the most extreme exploitative tendencies of industrial capitalism.

This special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies is devoted to a general rethinking of the Marxist premodern: its contours, its literary and cultural effects, its theoretical afterlife, and its limitations.

Contributors. Andrew Cole, Valerie Forman, Bruce Holsinger, Ethan Knapp, Maura B. Nolan, John Parker, Stephen H. Rigby, D. Vance Smith.

Contents:
1. The Marxist Premodern–Bruce Holsinger and Ethan Knapp
2. Historical Materialism: Social Structure and Social Change in the Middle Ages–Stephen H. Rigby
3. Marx and T. F. Tout: Household, City, and History at Manchester–D. Vance Smith
4. Making the Aesthetic Turn: Adorno, the Medieval, and the Future of the Past–Maura B. Nolan
5. What Hegel's Master–Slave Dialectic Really Means–Andrew Cole
6. Transformations of Value and the Production of "Investment" in the Early History of the English East India Company–Valerie Forman
7. What a Piece of Work Is Man: Shakespearean Drama as Marxian Fetish, the Fetish as Sacramental Sublime–John Parker

248 pages, Paperback

First published September 24, 2004

About the author

Bruce Holsinger is the author of five novels, including Culpability (forthcoming from Spiegel & Grau), The Displacements and The Gifted School (both from Riverhead), and many works of nonfiction, most recently On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age (Yale University Press). His books have been recognized with the Colorado Book Award, the John Hurt Fisher Prize, the Philip Brett Award, the John Nicholas Brown Prize, the Modern Language Association's Prize for a First Book, and others. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and many other publications and he has been profiled on NPR's Weekend Edition, Here & Now, and Marketplace. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Virginia, where he specializes in medieval literature and modern critical thought and serves as editor of the quarterly journal New Literary History. He also teaches craft classes and serves as board chairman for WriterHouse, a local nonprofit in Charlottesville.