2 Marxist literary theory and criticism

Marxist criticism reads a text for the relations of production behind it: who works, who owns, who is spoken for. Literature is treated not as a private aesthetic act but as a social product shaped by class. The critic asks whose experience the text treats as normal, whose labour is invisible in it, and what the text would look like from the standpoint of the people it passes over. The technique transfers directly to law: read an Act and ask whose interests its categories assume.