The Politics of Form rejects claims that the legacy of high theory has been superseded by New Historicism, post-colonial criticism, gender studies, environmental criticism, and archive studies by demonstrating that they all derive from it.

Introduction: The Durability of the Linguistic Metaphor, Chapter 1: "The Word Within": Egger, Saussure, Derrida, Chapter 2: Bakhtin, Shakespeare, and the Novel, Chapter 3: Deferred Action from Freud to Foucault, Chapter 4: Form and History from Dickens to Woolf, Chapter 5: Henry James and the Body English, Chapter 6: Sinclair Lewis and the American Language, Chapter 7: Black and Tan: DuBois, Faulkner, and The Joy Luck Club, Chapter 8: D.H. Lawrence: The Poem As Environment, Chapter 9: Mrs. Woolf, Mrs. Klein, Chapter 10: The Feudal Unconscious: Capitalism and the Family Romance, Coda: The Challenge of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

Perry Meisel, Professor of English at New York University for over 40 years until his retirement in 2016, has written on literature, music, theory, psychoanalysis, and culture since the 1970s. His articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice, Partisan Review, The Nation, The Atlantic, Raritan, October, and many other publications. He is the author of The Myth of Popular Culture (Blackwell, 2010), The Literary Freud (Routledge, 2007), The Cowboy and the Dandy (Oxford, 1999), The Myth of the Modern (Yale, 1987), The Absent Father (Yale, 1980), and Thomas Hardy (Yale, 1972). He is coeditor, with Haun Saussy, of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (Columbia, 2011), and coeditor, with Walter Kendrick, of Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924-25 (Basic Books, 1985). He is also the editor of Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1981). He received his B.A. Summa cum laude from Yale in 1970. He also received his M.Phil. (1973) and Ph.D. (1975) from Yale. He is the recipient of Yale's Wrexham Prize and Thomas G. Bergin Cup and research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Spencer Foundation. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and PEN and has been a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College.