Abstract: Marx did not take literature and art as isolated phenomena but approached literary phenomena with roughly the same way of thinking as he investigates other social phenomena. The general intellectual trajectory in his investigation followed the path from abstraction to concreteness, which exhibited in literary studies as the following three aspects. First, writers should observe the society and its age from historical point of view, and create typical character reflecting tendency of the age and social nature. Secondly, characterization in writings should demonstrate Shakespeare's realism instead of Schiller’s method so as to avoid turning the character into a mere mouthpiece of the spirit of the time. Marxist literary theory is not partial emphasis on some aspect of abstraction and concreteness, but promotes organic integration and dialectic unity of the two.

Key words: abstraction, concreteness, Marxist literary theory, intellectual trajectory