In the preface to a recent volume of academic essays titled Gramsci In The World, Marxist and formalist literary critic Frederic Jameson argues that, today more than ever, much of Gramscis value lies in the ambiguities that his Prison Notebooks, the thirty-three notebooks the Sardinia born communist wrote in prison between 1928 and 1934 under strict surveillance and limited critical sources available to him, necessarily resulted from the unfree physical conditions of the writing.