A definitive collection of Jameson's early essays.Ideologies of Theory, updated and available for the first time in a single volume, brings together theoretical essays that span Fredric Jameson’s long career as a critic. They chart a body of work suspended by the twin poles of literary scholarship and politcal history, occupying a space vibrant with the tension between critical exegesis and the Marxist intellectual tradition. Jameson’s work pushes out the boundaries of the text, making evident the interaction between literature and the disciplines of psychoanalysis, philosophy and cultural theory, all of which are shown to be inseparable from their ideological milieu.The essays in this volume track a shift from ideological analysis to the phenomenology of everyday life, and constitute a rigorous and passionate argument for the necessity of theory as the simultaneous critique of empiricism and idealist philosophy.