About the Book

Literature is often defined as a distinct category of writing in terms of particular formal or aesthetic attributes. Tony Bennett suggests that literature be re-defined as an institutionally defined field of textual uses and effects. Charting a course between literary aesthetics and their associated politics, Bennett engages critically with the work of the Marxist theoreticians Georg Lucaks, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and Frank Lentricchia. Bennett goes on to criticise post-structuralist and post-modernist methodologies, and to assert the need for a more definite enquiry into the institutional regulation of culture.