THIS IS A study with a double focus: In the first place it seeks to chart the parallel revaluation of both formalism and psychology in twentieth-century literary criticism by using the work and career of the French critic Charles Mauron (1899–1966) as both a diachronic and a synchronic scaffolding. Using a structure of biography and literary history, it investigates Mauron's rather odd position both inside and outside two different critical contexts, the French and the English – a position that makes his work a particularly revealing kind of reflection of the diverse critical trends and tensions of our age. As a product of modernism, Mauron was aware of and open to the seeming contradictions of both formalist and psychoanalytic aesthetic theories, although for ultimately different reasons: He was both a literary critic, intent upon investigating the forms and structures, as well as the meaning, of literary objects, and an aesthetician, concerned with the nature of the aesthetic experience, of the conditions of mind related to the production and comprehension of those objects. Mauron is best known as the formulator of a psychoanalytic approach to literature for which is reserved, in the French language and in this book, the name psychocritique.