Traces the intellectual roots of structuralism, dating from the early part of this century in the linguistic theories of Saussure, and the literary theory of Jakobson and the Russian formalists. It was in France in the 1950s that Barthes and Levi-Strauss helped to elaborate and popularize it.

Structuralism arose as an intellectual movement during the mid-1960s and flourished for some twenty years, before being absorbed into the Post-structuralist movement of the later 1980s. In its heyday, it was variously seen as a creed capable of explaining anything and everything, or else as a modish form of obscurantism. Today, as John Sturrock gracefully demonstrates in this new edition of his study, Structuralism can be seen for what it was – an important moment in the history of modern thought. Structures, Sturrock reminds us, are ubiquitous. In mathematics and the hard sciences their existence is taken for granted. Not so in the human sciences, however, into which Structuralist methods were introduced amidst enduring controversy by a group of energetic and influential French intellectuals – Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser. There was strong resistance to Structuralist ideas in such disciplines as social anthropology, history, or literary criticism, on the grounds that they were too impersonal and mechanistic to belong there. In Sturrock's book, Structuralism is rescued from the polemical context in which it was constricted for so long, and its distinctive methods are clearly described. Sturrock shows how these methods first evolved in the study of language and passed from there into the human sciences, and into the study and understanding of literature. He ends by considering the most vexed question of all to which Structuralism gave rise, and which Post-structuralism carried to an extreme – the importance or otherwise of the role of the subject. "Sturrock's insistence on the connections between structuralism and other modern movements of thought, together with his humane and commonsensical style of discussion, make the subject a great deal more accessible."DAVID ROBEY, 'THES'