Edited by Patricia Waugh, this comprehensive guide to literary theory and criticism includes 39 specially commissioned chapters by an outstanding international team of academics. The volume is divided into four parts. Part One covers the key philosophical and aesthetic origins of literary theory, Part Two looks at the foundational movements and thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century, Part Three offers introductory overviews of the most important movements and thinkers in modern literary theory and Part Four looks at emergent trends and future directions.
INTRODUCTION: CRITICISM, THEORY, AND ANTI-THEORY ; PART I CONCEPTS OF CRITICISM AND AESTHETIC ORIGINS ; 1. Mimesis: ancient Greek literary theory ; 2. Expressivity: the Romantic theory of authorship ; 3. Interpretation: hermeneutics ; 4. Value: criticism, canons, and evaluation ; PART II CRITICISM AND CRITICAL PRACTICES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ; 5. Literature and the academy ; 6. I. A. Richards ; 7. T. S. Eliot and the idea of tradition ; 8. Anthropology, myth, and modern criticism ; 9. F. R. Leavis: criticism and culture ; 10. Marxist aesthetics ; 11. William Empson: from verbal analysis to cultural criticism ; 12. The New Criticism ; 13. The intentional fallacy ; 14. Adorno and the Frankfurt School ; 15. Freud and psychoanalysis ; 16. The Russian debate on narrative ; 17. Bakhtin and dialogics ; 18. Form, rhetoric, and intellectual history ; 19. Literature into culture: cultural studies after Leavis ; PART III LITERARY THEORY: MOVEMENTS AND SCHOOLS ; 20. Structuralism and narrative poetics ; 21. Psychoanalysis after Freud ; 22. Deconstruction ; 23. Feminisms ; 24. Postcolonialism ; 25. Race, nation, and ethnicity ; 26. Reconstructing historicism ; 27. Postmodernism ; 28. Sexualities ; 29. Science and criticism: beyond the culture wars ; PART IV FUTURES AND RETROSPECTS ; 30. Performing literary interpretation ; 31. The responsibilities of the writer ; 32. Mixing memory and desire: psychoanalysis, psychology, and trauma theory ; 33. Theories of the gaze ; 34. Anti-canon theory ; 35. Environmentalism and ecocriticism ; 36. Cognitive literary criticism ; 37. Writing excess: the poetic principle of post-literary culture ; INDEX
