A rift has developed in Marxist criticism between such critics as Lukacs and Macherey who regard the novel as a means of exposing totalitarian ideology and others such as Debord and Jameson who regard the aesthetic of realism in the novel as a means of reinforcing the dominant ideology of modern capitalist culture within a "society of the spectacle." The intersection of representations of history and visual culture in the novel serves as a crucial point of access to this issue. Each chapter explores ways in which the novel can both conceal and reveal ideology by adopting a combination of White's "metahistorical" perspective, Mitchell's concept of the "metapicture," and the dynamics of ekphrasis. The first chapter examines the relationship between Thackeray's fiction and his lectures on history, as well as his attempt to position the novel between Carlyle's imported German subjectivism and the pretensions to scientific objectivity of French historiography. Chapter Two traces an increasingly ironic presence of historical and political ideology in descriptions of landscape beginning with Scott's Ivanhoe and ending with Naipaul's Guerrillas . The focus of the third chapter is the ideological conflict between surviving and revived forms of medieval architecture as theorized in the writings of Ruskin and Pater and dramatized in the novels of Hardy and Lawrence. Chapter Four analyzes the exposure of the narrative and literary elements of historiography within the tradition of pageantry as represented by Forster and Woolf. The subject of Chapter Five is the production of a Marxist consciousness in the works of Rushdie, Naipaul and Chandra through their treatment of post-colonial themes, such as the clash of oral and written history and the respective visual cultures of imperialist power and colony. An epilogue identifies the contemporary reification of Marxist criticism within Julian Barnes' novel England, England, which portrays a fragmented British empire in the act of selling the past in the form of an historical theme park as its only remaining commodity in a post-imperialist age.
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