Prison Notebooks

Introduction

Gramsci began the notebooks in 1929, three years after his arrest, and filled them in Fascist prisons and clinics until 1935, when his health collapsed. Without a library and under censorship, he wrote in fragments and used code words: Marxism, for example, appears as the “philosophy of praxis”. His sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht saved the notebooks after his death in 1937. An edition arranged by theme appeared in Italy in 1948–51; Valentino Gerratana’s critical edition of 1975 restored the original order. Alongside hegemony, key concepts are the “war of position”, “passive revolution”, the organic intellectual and the “subaltern” classes, a term later taken up by postcolonial studies.

Connections

Builds on

• The Prince1513 · Niccolò Machiavelli
• Theses on Feuerbach1845 · Karl Marx

Taken up in

• Marxism and Literature1977 · Raymond Williams
• Orientalism1978 · Edward Said
• Can the Subaltern Speak?1988 · Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak