ABSTRACT
W we turn our attention directly to literature, it is clear that a concern with form must rank as one of the central ‘structuralist’ preoccupations, so that a school of literary criticism which claims to focus attention pre-eminently upon form must consequently be of some interest to us. When in 1965 Tzvetan Todorov published in Paris a selection, translated into French, of the forty-year-old writings of a group of Russian critics under the title of Théorie de la Littérature, it attracted considerable notice and has since exerted a good deal of influence. The critics involved had all been members of what was known as the ‘Russian Formalist’ movement.
