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Karl Marx and World Literature. By S. S. Prawer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. xii, 446 pp. $19.50.Marxism and Literary Criticism. By Terry Eagleton. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. viii, 88 pp. $6.95, cloth. $2.65, paper.

There is a long row of German dissertations on this or that author's Belesenheit: a list of every book an author has read or referred to. Professor Prawer, Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at Oxford University—well known for his excellent book on Heine and a well-informed survey of Comparative Literature Studies—has done this job for Karl Marx with meticulous care, enormous diligence, and a desire for completeness which must be unrivaled in this type of study. He has assembled all the evidence for Marx's omnivorous reading in many literatures and has traced Marx's use of quotations and allusions to many books, to characters in fiction, and even to sayings or tags in all sorts of contexts. Because Mr. Prawer has elected a chronological order of exposition, he is forced to review the same or similar references many times over, as Marx calls somebody a Don Quixote, a Mephistopheles, a Shylock; or quotes the same passage from Faust, the Divine Comedy, and Shakespeare's Timon of Athens; or alludes to this or that poem by Schiller, Heine, or Freiligrath. Mr. Prawer's learning, ingenuity, and patience are beyond praise, but one wonders why we have to be told twice that Marx called a forgotten journalist named F. Zabel a Wackford Squeeres (pp. 203 and 392) or George IV, king of England, a Caliban (p. 243). Unfortunately, Mr. Prawer did not take Marx's advice that the mode of investigation should not be confused with the mode of presentation. Still, there is some interest in finding out what Marx had read of Russian authors and what he thought of them. Luckily they come bunched together at a specific time, in the last years of Marx's life (pp. 384-85).