This book was composed during the winter of 1936-7...the book pins exaggerated, indeed false, hopes on the independent liberation movement of the German people, on the Spanish revolution, etc...What I had in mind was a theoretical examination of the interaction between the historical spirit and the great genres of literature which portray the totality of history -- and then only as this applied to bourgeois literature; the change wrought by socialist realism lay outside the scope of my study...
...the fact that the historical novels which make the most noise today are those which accomodate a purely belletrist treatment of life to the latest fashions cannot affect the foundations of the artistic form...Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, Preface to the English edition, 1960.
...the historical novel of our day, despite the great talent of its best exponents, still suffers in many respects from the remnants of the harmful and still not entirely vanquished legacy of bourgeois decadence...its different problems of form are but artistic reflections of these social-historical transformations.Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, Forward, 1937.
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