Introduction

At the time of his death in 1990, one might have legitimately questioned the need for a book on Althusser and literary theory. At that moment, it appeared that Althusser’s influence on cultural and literary studies had waned considerably; the terms and concepts taken from or associated with his works and those of his closest associates, such as Pierre Macherey and Étienne Balibar,1 were seen with declining frequency; when they did appear they gave the work in which they were cited a dated air. In part, of course, this might be attributed to the fact that Althusser worked within a Marxist problematic, a problematic which by all accounts had been superseded both in practice and in theory. In literary studies, the field once occupied by Marxism had yielded to apparently rival theories, such as the New Historicism, whose very origins lay in a critique of Marxism by a number of its leading practitioners (Gallagher 1989). But perhaps even more damningly, the most well-known Marxist critics sought at this time to distance themselves from Althusser and “Althusserianism.”