The Big Names in Marxism
Karl Marx
So, let's get one thing straight: Karl didn't actually write literary theory himself. Have you seen the size of the books he wrote? He didn't have to just sit down writing about novels. Nevertheless, his ideas about culture's place in society were revolutionary, and they totally form the basis for current Marxist theory. Marx said that you can't understand a book if you don't understand where it came from, and that's a big idea that 20th-century theorists put to work.
Lukács, the Frankfurt School, and Some French People
György Lukács (LOO-katch), a Hungarian Marxist critic, did not direct Star Wars. That was George Lucas. What Lukács did do was write about the interaction of history and fiction. He was all about the big picture, and he thought that the way to study literature was as a specific phenomenon of history.
At the same time, a bunch of German critics, including boys Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno, started to take popular culture very seriously—as seriously as only Germans can. With a few others, these guys became known as the Frankfurt School, which lasted until after the Second World War.
A little bit later, in the 1960s and 1970s, some French smarty-pants, including Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey, who were influenced by Freud as well as Marx, went ahead and revived Marxism, this time creating a theory about how literature fits into the economy.
Postmodernism and Cultural Studies
Around the same time, two Brits were updating Marx for a new postwar generation. Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton, two university professors, did something miraculous: they wrote clearly. You can pretty much understand every word they wrote.
Not impressed? Go and read Frederic Jameson. We dare you. This American is possibly the smartest cookie in the Marxist pack. Some people consider his work on the "political unconscious" to be the best Marxist criticism there is—but it's some tough stuff to slog through.
What all of these critics do is update Marxist theory to address specific issues like postmodernism and contemporary politics. Ever heard of a little thing called cultural studies? This is where it comes from.