This volume constitutes both an attack on modern left wing literary theory - the main product of the last Marxist renaissance in the past thirty years - and a defence of the one element of Marxism which, in the general collapse, modern theorists have been happiest to lose, its economic materialism. It traces Marxist theory from its beginnings in Hegelian idealism to its end in Althusser's structuralism, and concludes that while Marxist economics will not work, and the type of revolution prophesied was fantasy, the principle of historical materialism remains intact and defensible. This will be a key text in literary and cultural studies as well as being of interest to students on philosophy and sociology courses.

Marxist cultural theory underlies much teaching and research in university departments of literature and has played a crucial role in the development of recent theoretical work. Feminism, New Historicism, cultural materialism, postcolonial theory, and queer theory all draw upon ideas about cultural production which can be traced to Marx, and significantly each also has a special relation with Renaissance literary studies. This book explores the past and continuing influence of Marx's ideas in work on Shakespeare. Marx's ideas about cultural production and its relation to economic production are clearly explained, together with the standard terminology and concepts such as base/superstructure, ideology, commodity fetishism, alienation, and reification. The influence of Marx's ideas on the theory and practice of Shakespeare criticism and performance is traced from the Victorian age to the present day. The continuing importance of these ideas is illustrated via new Marxist readings of King Lear, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, The Comedy of Errors, All's Well that Ends Well, and The Winter's Tale.

While the world seems to be getting ever smaller and globalization has become the ubiquitous buzz-word, regionalism and fragmentation also abound. This might be due to the fact that, far from being the alleged production of cultural homogeneity, the global is constantly re-defined and altered through the local. This tension, pervading much of contemporary culture, has an obvious special relevance for the new varieties of English and the literature published in English world-wide. Postcolonial literatures exist at the interface of English as a hegemonic medium and its many national, regional and local competitors that transform it in the new English literatures. Thus any exploration of a globalization of cultures has to take into account the fact that culture is a complex field characterized by hybridization, plurality, and difference. But while global or transnational cultures may allow for a new cosmopolitanism that produces ever-changing, fluid identities, they do not give rise to an egalitarian ‘global village’ – an asymmetry between centre and periphery remains largely intact, albeit along new parameters. The essays collected in this volume offer readings of literary, theoretical, and filmic texts from the postcolonial world. These texts are read as attempts to articulate the global with the local from a perspective of immersion in the actual diversity of life-worlds, focusing on such issues as consumption, identity-politics, and modes of affiliation. In this sense, they are global fragments: locally refractured figurations of an experience of world-wide interconnectedness.

Providing an overview and Marxist assessment of Tony Blair and New Labour's UK education policies, structures, and processes, the contributors in this exciting new collection discuss specific aspects of education policy and practices.

In this timely study, Pawling argues for a renewal of the 'politics of intellectual life', calling for an engaged critical theory written in the spirit of May 1968, as exemplified in the works of figures such as Sartre, Derrida, Badiou, Jameson and Said.