This book examines the history of Yuri Lotmans Tartu (or Moscow-Tartu) School of Semiotics, which was active in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s, and combines a comparative perspective on the Tartu paradigm with close attention to its social context. Comparing Tartu with other major idioms in cultural theory from Russian Formalism to (post-) structuralism, this study reconstructs its evolution from the early ideal of "exact science" to a variety of conceptual frameworks which combined an emphasis on the autonomy of cultural texts with elaborate analysis of the social and intellectual...