Todorov traces Western thinking about signs and symbols from classical rhetoric and Augustine through Romanticism and into modern linguistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology and literary theory.

The main thesis is the historical shift from treating signs as conventional vehicles for meaning toward the Romantic idea of the symbol as organic, inexhaustible and resistant to paraphrase. He shows that the apparently simple word symbol carries several incompatible intellectual traditions inside it.

Originally published in French as Théories du symbole in 1977 and translated by Catherine Porter, this is both a history of semiotics and a critique of its tendency to imagine itself newly invented. Todorov’s range—from Aristotle and Augustine to Goethe, Freud and Saussure—makes it especially useful for readers interested in how language exceeds literal reference, and how ideas about interpretation migrate between theology, poetry and the human sciences. Dense but unusually navigable: serious theory without the usual ceremonial fog machine. 

Cornell University Press paperback, 1982; fourth printing, 1995. Translated from the French by Catherine Porter. Very good condition with light rubbing and minor edge wear.