Typicality doctrine originated in Marx and Engels’s Sickingen letters

Evidence

No doubt the most obvious and immediate method of characterizing what is distinctive in realism lies in an analysis of the content of the realistic works, and in particular of the human motif in them, of the characters themselves. For Lukács realistic characters are distinguished from those in other types of literature by their typicality: they stand, in other words, for something larger and more meaningful than themselves, than their own isolated individual destinies. They are concrete individualities and yet at the same time maintain a relationship with some more general or collective human substance. The notion of typicality, which for Western literary theory has become old-fashioned if not downright suspect, was already present in what must be the first full-scale specimen of Marxist literary criticism, namely the long exchange of letters between Marx, Engels, and Lassalle about the latter’s play, Franz von Sickingen. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 387

Categorization

• XREF: Roots the concept of typicality in the Marx-Engels-Lassalle Sickingen exchange — useful for the reader tracing concepts back to their Marxist origins.
• DEFINE: Defines the Lukácsian notion of typicality: characters standing for a collective substance beyond individual destinies.