Abstract

Christopher Caudwell was the foremost marxist aesthetician to write in English. His major contribution was a theory of the function of literature, most of which appeared in his last work, Illusion and Reality (1937). Caudwell, who could not afford to attend the university, spent whatever time he could spare in the last three years of his life (he was killed in Spain in 1937 fighting for the Loyalists) studying the marxist classics and writing. Partly because of his lack of higher education and also because he was busy making a living by editing engineering journals, he was isolated from the other members of his literary generation. Nevertheless, he advanced further than the others in his dialectical view of literature.