SOURCE: Ryan, Michael. “Literary Criticism and Cultural Science: Transformations in the Dominant Paradigm of Literary Study.” North Dakoka Quarterly 51, no. 1 (winter 1983): 100-12.

In the following essay, Ryan examines the expansion of traditional literary criticism to include politicization, attributing this change to the renewal of Marxist study in the West.

Literary criticism is being transformed; it is becoming at once more broad in subject matter or scope and more pointed in its political tone and purpose. Radical and Marxist critics like Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and Tony Bennett increasingly depart from the traditional canon of literary study as well as from the traditionally disinterested and apolitical tone of literary scholarship and instead study culture with a view to transforming it politically. This development is due in part to a renewal of Marxism in the West that has provoked a rediscovery of non-elite or popular culture as well...