A Theory of Literary Production

This book is quite simply a "must have" for anyone working in literary theory, literary analysis, or even historiography. Predating Derrida's Of Grammatology by a year, it nevertheless anticipates many aspects of that more famous work. This book has suffered greatly from Eagleton's misappropriation and subsequent disowning of its theses, which he transformed into a structuralist criticism. Interestingly it is only through what this book (and the essays in his In A Materialist Way collection) says about the materialities of reading that we can really grasp the operation that Eagleton's *interpretation* performed and its effects in subsequent readings of Macherey's work. I would also highly recommend Warren Montag's Louis Althusser and Bodies, Masses, Power books be read alongside this book by Macherey. It also provides a critique of the "author" that anticipates in some ways, and complements in others, that put forward by Michel Foucault in "What is an Author?" If you have Of Grammatology, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and/or Reading Capital you need this book because it not only will enable the theses of those books to be extended and developed but also will correct the idealist and/or structuralist elements of those books. The critique of Barthes in this book is very valuable, as are the analyses of Defoe and Verne.