What is the content of a literary text? The extent to which literary criticism has thought this question trivial and unimportant is conveyed well by the Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms, which offers a seven-paragraph definition for ‘form’ but contains no entry for ‘content’, going directly from ‘consonance’ to ‘context’ (it is perhaps worth noting that the dictionary does find space for ‘cybercriticism’, ‘eurocentrism’, and a six-paragraph definition of ‘rhizome’). Yet the dictionary also, if only accidentally, conveys a sense of the necessity of the concept. Aside from the use of the term ‘content’ in dozens of definitions of other terms, the dictionary's definition of ‘paraphrase’ ends with this line: ‘See also CONTENT, FORM, STYLE, TEXTURE’. So at some point it appears that the authors recognised the need for a definition of content, but in the face of the competing need to devote adequate attention to Deleuze and Guattari they ultimately decided it wasn't worth it.

To its credit, the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms at least includes the word, defining it thus:

What is striking about this attempt to define the word is the way it reverses itself. The definition starts with what has been one common way of defining content and explicating the content/form distinction: it's the what-is-said by the text, versus the how-it-is-said of form.