One of the leading American literary critics of the post-war years, Steven Marcus, who has died aged 79, was part of that extraordinary generation of Jewish critics, including Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom, who transformed literary criticism in the late 20th century. Marcus wrote widely on 19th century literature and on Freud and psychoanalysis.

He was born in the Bronx in 1928, the son of Nathan and Adeline Muriel (née Gordon) Marcus. His grandparents came from near Vilnius, Lithuania. His family were badly affected by the Depression and his father was unemployed for six years. He attended Columbia University in New York where he studied under Lionel Trilling, who became a lifelong friend and mentor. Together they collaborated on and edited an abridged version of Ernest Jones’s three-volume biography of Freud.

Marcus graduated in 1948 and after a short stint at Cambridge and two years in the army, he completed his PhD on Charles Dickens at Columbia in 1961 and taught there for the rest of his career.

Marcus is best known for his work in the 1960s and 70s: Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (1965) using psychoanalytic ideas to explore Dickens’s then neglected early novels. His best-known work was The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-19th Century England (1966), described by The New York Times Book Review as “a critical as well as an historical tour de force.” It was a pioneering work in the history of sexuality and pornography. It topped the national bestseller list in Britain. His later works included Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (1975), a book of reviews and essays, and Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis (1984). He edited The World of Modern Fiction (1967), Art, Politics and Will: Essays in Honor of Lionel Trilling (1977), Medicine and Western Civilization (1995) and a book series called Psychoanalysis and Culture.

In the 1960s he was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. He became a member and organiser of the Columbia Faculty Peace Action Committee. Marcus was a leading humanist critic who never felt at home in the new world of literary theory in the 1980s and 90s. He became drawn into the so-called “culture wars”. In a special issue of Partisan Review in 1993, Marcus characterised political correctness as a new incarnation of the “soft totalitarianism” described by George Orwell, whereby orthodoxies “muzzle, stifle, or suppress dissent, and create fear and anxiety in those whose thinking deviates from their prescriptions.” In his book (Engels, Manchester and the Working Class, 1974) he lamented the decline of literary criticism “into aesthetic or political fashionability on the one side and academic stupor on the other.”

In 1993 Marcus was named Dean of Columbia College and vice-president for arts and sciences. He became a professor emeritus in 2004.

Divorced from his first wife, Algene Ballif Marcus, in 1965, he married the German sociologist Gertrud Lenzer the following year. The couple had one child, John Nathaniel Marcus, a violinist. He is survived by his wife, son and a grandson.

DAVID HERMAN

Steven Marcus born December 13, 1928. Died April 25, 2018