Adrian Marino was one of the greatest and widely known Romanian literary theorists, with an utterly remarkable biography. His contribution to the development of literary studies is not easy to describe. In the second part of the twentieth century – namely when Marino writes and promotes (like few other Romanian researchers) his scientific work, in the country, as well as abroad, the main areas in which his contributions fall under - comparative literature and the theory of literature – go through convulsions and tremendous changes, on one hand, stemming from the internal crisis of literature, on the other hand, by the general crisis of the sciences of literature, increasingly contendened by cultural studies. Through his scientific achievements, along with the implicit and often explicit militancy of his scholarly endeavors, the Romanian theorist is, along with Terry Eagleton and Antoine Compagnon, amongst the few contemporary literary theorists who copes with the mutations in the development of literary studies at the end of the XXth century, based on his own (personal) theoretical projects.