Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- 1. Foreword to Literature and Democracy -- 2. Democracy and Culture -- 3. Lenin and the Question of Culture -- 4. Literature and Democracy I -- 5. Literature and Democracy II -- 6. Populist Writers in the Balance -- 7. Poetry of the Party -- 8. Free or Directed Art? -- 9. Against Old and New Legends -- 10. The Unity of Hungarian Literature -- 11. The Tasks of Marxist Philosophy in the New Democracy -- 12. On ‘Kitsch’ and ‘Proletcult’ -- 13. Hungarian Theories of Abstract Art -- 14. The Hungarian Communist Party and Hungarian Culture -- 15. The Revision of Hungarian Literary History -- Historical, Literary, and Biographical Glossary -- References -- Person Index -- Subject Index.

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When the Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic György Lukács returned to Hungary from Moscow after World War II, he engaged in a highly active phase of writing and speaking about the democratic culture needed to exorcise the remnants of fascism and to create the conditions for the advance of socialism in Central Europe. His essays of the period, including the influential volume Literature and Democracy , appear here for the first time in English translation. Engaged with questions of realist and modernist world-views in art, the relations of literary history to politics and social history, and the role of cultural intellectuals in public life, these essays offer a new look at one of the most influential Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century.