1. Marxism and Literary Criticism
Gracie Griffith, Spencer Decuir, Johnny Rollins, and Abel George

2. Basic Tenets of Belief
Marxism is a political belief that believes in the elimination of social classes. Marx and Engels came to the conclusion that there was a struggle between classes which drove him to change his society through Marxism...

3. Basic Beliefs cont.
From these beliefs, literary critics look with these points of view in pieces of writing.
The author’s social class
Its’ effects in the author’s society
Examining history and the culture of the times in the text
Investigating how the author correctly or incorrectly portrays the historical period

4. Marxist lit theory
•Focuses on the representation of class distinctions and class conflict in literature.
•Focuses more on social and political elements than artistic and visual (aesthetic) elements of a text.

5. The Years of Marxism
The “Marxist Ideology” started in the mid-1800s when Karl Marx started to write about the basic ideologies of Marxism and publishing three different works on the basic theories and ideas present in Marxism.
His Literary Works
The Communist Manifesto
Das Kapital
The Contribution to the Critique of a Political Economy

6. Authors Using Marxism
Karl Marx- wrote marxist criticism about Johann Wolfgang von Goeth and William Shakespeare
Anton Chekhov, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky- powerful novelists and playwrights in Russia

7. Bibliography http://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/marxist.crit.html