What follows here is both a discussion of a topic and a review of currently available books on that topic. The topic itself is important for two reasons: (a) because formalism and structuralism have indeed made significant contributions to the poetics of fiction, and (b) because these contributions have not been sufficiently recognized by American (and British) critics. The achievements of formalism have not been sufficiently appreciated because they have simply been unavailable until recently to readers who, like myself, are ignorant of the Slavic languages. Even now, we do not have in English all the formalist criticism I, for one, would like to see available. We have the excellent little anthology of Lee Lemon and Marion Reis (Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Bison Books, 1965-hereafter abbreviated to L & R) and a new volume, also well edited, by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Readings in Russian Poetics, M.I.T., 1971-abbreviated to RRP)-and that is all. Beyond these, there are some translations into French, Italian, and German. Thus the formalists have been only recently, and then scantily, available through their own writings. But I believe it is possible now to make a fair estimate of their achievements, even for a reader who, like myself, is confined to English and French. The structuralists pose another problem. Where formalism is in some sense a completed literary movement, which can be treated historically (as it is in Victor Erlich's excellent Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, Mouton, 1955), structuralism is very much in a state of becoming, with all the subdivisions and internecine struggles that we expect to find in a revolution in progress-especially one that shows signs of being successful. And where formalism was primarily a literary movement strongly influenced by linguistics, structuralism is a whole movement of mind, which no single discipline can claim to dominate. Thus Jean Piaget, in his superb survey of structuralist thinking (Structuralism, Basic Books, 1970), can treat his subject as it appears in mathematics, logic, physical science, biology, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy. The study of language and other semiotic systems can make a strong claim to being at the center of all structuralist activity, but the study of literature has only a small piece of this intellectual action. In addition to this, structuralist literary criticism is mainly untranslated from the French at the present time, and some of it appears to be equally impenetrable in either language. To understand it, a considerable investment of time and energy seems to be required-much of it to be expended in studying disciplines which do not appear to be immediately useful in the neatly compartmented world most aca-