Art's struggle for freedom
Lukács, the literary historian
pp. 85-106
in: , The rationalism of Georg Lukács, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
Lukács began his career as a literary and theatre critic, and he responded throughout his life to developments in contemporary literature. Literature also forms much of the material he treats in his great aesthetic syntheses. He also had an interest in the theoretical and methodological issues of literary history writing.His work in this field is particularly closely tied to the language and literature of his native land. His critiques of the Hungarian literary works of his era and his writings on the classics of Hungarian literature are relatively unknown internationally, even though they form a significant part of his literary historical work.A striking feature of Lukács's conception of literary history and his literary criticism is the intensity of his interest in the canonical works representing the classics of world literature.Present chapter deals with Lukács's theory of the history of literature. Special attention is paid to his judgment on Dante, Goethe and Imre Madách, the Hungarian dramatist of the nineteenth century.