For more than thirty years, Fredric Jameson has been one of the most productive, wide-ranging, and distinctive literary theorists in the United States and the Anglophone world. Marxism and Form provided a pioneering account of the work of the major European Marxist theorists--T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Jean-Paul Sartre--work that was, at the time, largely neglected in the English-speaking world. Through penetrating readings of each theorist, Jameson developed a critical mode of engagement that has had tremendous influence. He provided a framework for analyzing the connection between art and the historical circumstances of its making--in particular, how cultural artifacts distort, repress, or transform their circumstances through the abstractions of aesthetic form.
Jameson's presentation of the critical thought of this Hegelian Marxism provided a stark alternative to the Anglo-American tradition of empiricism and humanism. It would later provide a compelling alternative to poststructuralism and deconstruction as they became dominant methodologies in aesthetic criticism.
One year after Marxism and Form, Princeton published Jameson's The Prison-House of Language(1972), which provided a thorough historical and philosophical description of formalism and structuralism. Both books remain central to Jameson's main intellectual legacy: describing and extending a tradition of Western Marxism in cultural theory and literary interpretation.
'Marxism and Form provides, for American readers, a long overdue introduction to the work of the most important of the Hegelian-Marxists concerned with the problems of culture and society.' The New Scholar
'Mr. Jameson's exposition of their ideas is constantly exhilarating in the spirit of that tradition which extends from Plato's Symposium through Diderot's Conversations to Hegel's Phenomenology. From this tradition Mr. Jameson inherits his inventive, playful, even heady style and his carefree mingling of the 'disciplines' (philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, economics). His best and longest chapter is devoted to Sartre, on whom he has written before and who has influenced his method most strongly... Mr. Jameson's fastidious attention to form yields some magnificent insights.' - TLS
'The novelty of Jameson's approach lies with his emphasis on form rather than mere content as the key to the dialectical relationship of a given literary or artistic work to the determinate social moment in which it has its ground. He pursues this critical insight in a series of brilliant interpretive essays on major figures of Western Marxism whose ultimate purpose is to reassimilate the fundamental problems of Hegelian philosophy and related aspects of phenomenology and existentialism to Marxist critical theory in general and thus preapre the theoretical basis for a dialectical criticism of literature. Not just a major contribution to the theory of literary criticism, this book is an intellectual event of the first order.' - Library Journal
