SOURCE: A review of Marxism and Form, in Modern Language Review, Vol. 69, No. 3, July, 1974, pp. 599-601.

In the following review, Culler offers a positive assessment of Marxism and Form.

Marxism and Form is the most important work of critical theory to appear in English since Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, and if it is less ambitious than Frye’s Anatomy, less animated by a desire to systematize and less informed by a particular programme for criticism, it is perhaps the reflection of a more penetrating intelligence which is willing to pursue difficult problems as far as it can and anxious to undertake the larger tasks of exploring possible connexions between literary form and the process of history itself. The difference between the two works lies in the fact that Frye’s static pattern of archetypes is fragmented and set in motion by constant awareness of both historical...