ABSTRACT
A Theory of Literary Production was published in 1966, at a time when theoretical debate in France was dominated by structuralism, a structuralism which had taken control of the domain of the human sciences and thereby significantly modified the problematic of literary studies. The structuralist position, never the monolithic doctrine it was later held to be, opened up a spacious field of investigation and discussion, and it was initially reactive. To simplify drastically, it could be said that it arose from a concern to consider formal relations ahead of the mass of immediately experienced content. In this respect structuralism created a problem for those who-though by no means mere believerstook seriously the principle theses of Marxism. How was it possible to be simultaneously a materialist and a formalist?
