Hegemony: Gramsci's Theory of Consent in Literary and Cultural Criticism

N o army enforced the idea that a certain accent sounds "educated" or that a certain kind of novel counts as serious literature while another is merely entertainment. Nobody was arrested for preferring one over the other. And yet these hierarchies hold remarkably firm, generation after generation, with astonishingly little visible coercion required to maintain them. That quiet, consent-based durability is exactly what the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci set out to explain with the concept of hegemony, and it has since become one of the most load-bearing terms in literary and cultural criticism. This is a full account of what hegemony actually means in Gramsci's sense, how it differs from simple domination or dictatorship, and why the concept became indispensable for reading literature, ideology, and culture together. Table of Contents Hegemony Before Gramsci: A Much Older, Simpler Word The word itself predates Gramsci by centuries. It comes from the Greek hegemonia ,…