Richard Terdiman is Associate Professor of French Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

An excellent example of a kind of literary history that is possible under the aegis of recent theories of the sign when linked with the social analyses of thinkers such as Foucault, Gramsci, and Bourdieu.... The result is a coherent theory of texts and social contexts which diminishes the role of neither and an impressive application that demonstrates a complex interanimation between the discourses of the nineteenth-century French mass media and the more 'literary' works of Balzac, Flaubert, Daumier, Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Marx.(Virginia Quarterly Review)