The Ideologies of Theory is a two-volume work bringing together for the first time the theoretical essays that span Fredric Jameson's career as a critic. Most of the were composed under a particular set of constraints: the tension between literary criticism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the need to explain the Marxist intellectual tradition. These essays engage in both activities, thereby enlarging the conception of the literary text; they make its political, psychoanalytic, ideological, philosophical, and social resonances audible, and demonstrate the attraction of what lyotard has termed the desire called Marx especially its capacity to tie an individual existence or temporality to the larger narrative we call History. The essays in Volume 2 mark a shift from the problems of textual interpretation treated in volume 1 to the issues raised by cultural and historical analysis: new forms of spatial analysis, the politics of historiography, some approaches to postmodernism. Jameson's topics include Maz Weber as a storyteller, architecture and ideology pleasure as a political issue the conflict in Marxist thought between partisans of Brecht and Lukacs, and the theoretical and methodological problems involved in describing a historical period.