Until a few years ago, aestheticians, critics, and literary historians accorded sociology only marginal status. However, the availability of Georg Lukacs’ early work, the psychological and epistemological researches of Jean Piaget, and the acceptance of the dialectic as genetic structuralism has changed all that.

Traditional sociology —which still dominates university teaching — tried to relate the content of a literary work to the content of the collective unconscious: how men think and act in daily life. Such criticism becomes more effective the more mundane is the writer being studied, content merely to relate his experiences without imaginatively transposing them. Structural sociology begins from premises that exclude those of traditional sociology.