Rahv is best known as an editor, since its founding in 1934, of Partisan Review. [The essays in Literature and the Sixth Sense] are very much the writings of a partisan and public man who is as much concerned about influencing cultural debate as in elucidating texts. So this is literary criticism of a special kind: the essay as position paper, as a tactical exercise in a continuing war of ideas. Rahv acknowledges the influence of psychoanalysis, existentialism and anthropology, and he uses all of these resources of modern criticism to good effect; but his method depends basically on Marxism, with its stress on the social determinants of literature, the art object as it exists in the dimension of time. The modern consciousness of time, the sense of history, is the "sixth sense" of Rahv's title. (p. 607)

The wit and vivacity of [Rahv's] early essays are a reminder how...