A knowledgeable history of and attack on recent critical movements in the West, interspersed with bows to dialectical materialism. The book succeeds in showing fundamental similarities in critics as diverse as Leavis, Wimsatt and Crane. The treatment is illuminating, though most of the attack had, as Weimann admits, been previously launched by other "bürgerliche" critics in the United States, England and West Germany. The constructive side of the book is far less substantial than the destructive.--E. D. H.