>Yoshie:
>>That Austen,
>>while embracing the conservative order, nonetheless did not shy away
>>from portraying in telling details the problems of capitalist society
>>in _Mansfield Park_ is what is valuable for us. Oftentimes,
>>conservatives in the past were better able to see the problems of
>>capitalism & the ideology of individualism it entails than liberals.
>
>Balzac is another example, right?
***** Marxism and art
An Introduction to Trotsky's Writings on Art, by Alan Woods
...Nowhere and at no time have artists and writers stood outside or above society. They are consciously or unconsciously moulded by the general tendencies in society. In class society this means that they fall under the influence of one or another of the contending classes. Of course, the influence is rarely simple or direct. Nor does it follow that an artist or writer who has adopted a conservative or even reactionary standpoint necessarily produces bad art. One of Marx's favourite writers was the great French realist novelist Balzac. His voluminous Commedie Humaine contains a very precise description of French society in the early years of the 19th century, and in particular a detailed portrait of the rise of a new social type -the French bourgeois. In a political sense, Balzac's sympathies were with the old French nobles, and in that sense he was a conservative. But so great was his artistic genius, and so truthful was his depiction of these processes, that he was compelled to go beyond his own standpoint. As Engels wrote:
"Balzac was thus compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and describes them people deserving no better fate." (Marx and Engels, On Art and Literature, p. 92.)...
<http://www.trotsky.net/trotsky_year/marxism_and_art.html> *****
Yoshie