This collection revisits A Theory of Literary Production (1966) to show how Pierre Macherey’s remarkable—and still provocative—early work can contribute to contemporary discussions about the act of reading and the politics of formal analysis. Across a series of historically and philosophically contextualized readings, the volume’s contributors interrogate Macherey’s work on a range of pressing issues, including the development of a theory of reading and criticism, the relationship between the spoken and the unspoken, the labor of poetic determination and of literature’s resistance to ideological context, the literary relevance of a Spinozist materialism, the process of racial subjectification and the ontology of Blackness, and a theorization of the textual surface. Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production also includes three new texts by Macherey, presented here in English for the first time: his postface to the revised French edition of A Theory of Literary Production; “Reading Althusser,” in which Macherey analyzes the concept of symptomatic reading; and a comprehensive interview in which Macherey reflects on the historical conditions of his early work, the long arc of his career at the intersection of philosophy and literature, and the ongoing importance of Louis Althusser’s thought.
Recent translations of Macherey’s work into English have introduced new readers to the critic’s enduring power and originality. Timely in its questions and teeming with fresh insights, Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production demonstrates the depths to which his work resonates, now more than ever.
More than a literary study, this book is an analysis of sexual attitudes and practices in the Romantic period, and a contribution to the history and theory of feminism. Shelley is shown to have anticipated in many ways the work of modern students of human sexual behavior. He was strikingly ahead of his time in his attitude toward women: his ideal of love postulated the equality of the sexes, and his theory of psychosexual identification, like mated to like, extended the feminist ideology of his mother-in-law, Mary Wollstonecraft. Moreover, in his own person and practice he came close to the androgynous ideal of the modern woman's movement.
In exploring the many aspects of his subject, Brown compares Shelley with his contemporaries, particularly Byron, and draws upon extensive research into the laws, ideas, and practices of the period.
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