86 SOCIAL SCIENTIST by Stalin's cultural thug Zhdanov" (pp 37-38) in the perversions and aberrations of futurism and Proletkult ideas. Socialist realism as a trend and method of literary creation committed to truthful reflection of the revolutionary dynamics of a society in transition to communism demands and deserves, for a just analysis, a sober and mature approach which is lacking in this book. Problems of form and content, writers' commitment and technical aspects of literary production have been discussed in the course of presenting the ideas of Lukacs, Brecht and Walter Benjamin. Eagleton could have considerably enriched the content of his book if he had cared to review the recent work done on aesthetics and literary theory in socialist countries. Eagleton rightly sees in criticism a weapon to liberate ourselves from exploitation and oppression. But the claim he makes on behalf of Marxist criticism may sound, in view of its current minority status in the Anglo-American academic and literal y establishments, too ambitious. In his Myths of Power he says: ^Marxist criticism must refuse to occupy its modest niche within ihe formidable array of critical methods—mythological, psychoanalytical^theological, st\listic—which reflects the tolerant philistinism of a liberal democracy'^ (p 2). When we read the traditional, liberal, academic writings on the Brontes we would not know that the sisters lived through an era in English history which witnessed such crucial events like machine-breaking, Reform agitation. Corn Laws and Chartism. In these books we are not shown how history directly or indirectly disrupted the personal lives of these sensitive individuals. Eagleton explores the ideological roots of the Bronte novels in the specific social conditions of the 19th century England. He is alive to the danger of crude sociological reductionism which tries to establish a one-to-one relation between socio-historical facts and works of art.To circumvent the danger of simplified sociologism Eagleton employs in his study some categories first enunciated in the writings of European Marxists like Lukacs, Goldmann and Althusser. From Goldmann he borrows the concept of ^categorial structure" comprising shared categories in forming heterogeneous works and shaping the consciousness of classes or groups producing them. From Althusser he takes over the concept of^overdeternnnation", originally employed by Freud in a different context. Althusser uses the concept to describe the way in which contradictions in society condense into complex unity and in which subsidiary conflicts individually and cumulatively determine the major contradiction. Lukacs equips himself with the idea of ^'possible consciousness" referring to the limitations of the consciousness of an historical period which can be abolished only by a transformation of real relation. Whatever may be the power of the individual imagination there are limits of what can be historically said in a specific historical context.