Daniel Hartley is an assistant professor in world literatures at Durham University (UK). He is the author of The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (Brill, 2017).
Fifty years ago, socialist writer Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City challenged preconceptions about the gap between rural and urban life. His book exposed the realities of class exploitation — and imagined the abolition of the country-city divide.
Karl Marx wasn’t merely a great thinker who was also a glorious prose stylist. His brilliance as a writer was inseparable from his greatness as a thinker.