Realism and anti-realism in the work of George Lukács

Bibliography: pages 111-118.This essay sets out to explore Lukács's views on realism and its polar opposite. anti-realism, in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. As a Marxist, Lukács's views on literature are closely interwoven with his views of society and and social development. This necessitates first looking at Lukács's theory of society and history as expressed in the epochal History and Class Consciousness. The essay firstly attempts to present and criticize the central Lukácsian concept of concrete totality. Totality, for Lukács, is not a static concept but a dynamically evolving, ever-changing idea. However, he tends to view totality as simply a concept of contemplation. Lukács indicates the proletariat as the subject-object of Western European history