Prison Notebooks

This is the first time ever that Gramsci's extraordinary Prison Notebooks are available in English as he wrote them in italian, in their fragemntary brilliance and their disconcertingly restless, unorthodox probity. Joseph Buttigieg's work is a monument of scholarship and of supple, deeply sensitive translation. When his work is completed in subsequent volumes a remarkable monument of human courage and intellectual resourcefulness will stand forth as never before. -- Edward W. Said Until Joseph A. Buttigieg's meticulous translation and critical attention to Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, this invaluable text, a testimony to the most emancipatory thinking of our time, was available to English readers only in an artificially contrived form. Now Buttigieg's monumental and magesterial work is available in paperback. Scholars, teachers, students, activists, general readers--rejoice! -- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University A poignant record of [Gramsci's] thoughts from a Fascist prison cell, adding a human touch to a key political figure. -- Terry Eagleton Prison Notebooks is one of the fundamental texts of modern thought. Politics, cultural studies, philosophy, history, the dialectic--everything is here. Buttigieg's translation is a superb achievement." -- Fredric Jameson

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), generally considered the most original political writer in the tradition of Western Marxism, is one of the outstanding intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, he died before fully regaining his freedom. While in prison, Gramsci wrote a series of notebooks covering an extraordinarily wide range of issues; they are his principal achievement. Written without thought of publication, the pages of Gramscis notebooks record and reveal his interests in history and historiography, the role of intellectuals in society, political theory, philosophy, Americanism and Fordism, religion, education, cultural analysis, literature, folklore, and linguistics. The integral text of the notebooks gives readers direct access not only to Gramscis influential ideas but also to the intellectual workshop where those ideas were forged.