Marxism and Form
20th Century Dialectical Theories of Literature

Providing an account of the work of the European Marxist theorists, this book presents 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.

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.