Table of Content

1. A Contents arranged historically
2. Ferdinand de Saussure The object of study
3. Walter Benjamin The storyteller
4. Roman Jakobson Linguistics & poetics The metaphoric & metonymic poles
5. Jacques Lacan The insistence of the letter in the unconscious
6. Jacques Derrida Structure, sign & play in the discourse of the human sciences
7. Mikhail Bakhtin From the prehistory of novelistic discourse
8. Tzvetan Todorov The typology of detective form
9. Roland Barthes The death of the author Textual analysis: Poe's 'Valdemar'
10. Michel Foucault What is an author?
11. Wolfgang Iser The reading process: a phenomenological approach
12. Julia Kristeva The ethics of linguistics
13. Harold Bloom Poetic origins & final phases
14. E D Hirsch Jr. Faulty perspectives
15. M H Abrams The deconstructive angel
16. J Hillis Miller The critics as host
17. Helene Cixous Sorties
18. Edward Said Crisis (in orientalism)
19. Stanley Fish Interpreting the Variorum
20. Elaine Showalter Feminist criticism in the wilderness
21. Paul de Man The resistance to theory
22. Fredric Jameson The politics of theory: Ideological positions in the postmodernism debate
23. Terry Eagleton Capitalism, modernism & postmodernism
24. Geoffrey Hartman The interpreter's Freud
25. Juliet Mitchell Femininity, narrative & psychoanalysis
26. Umberto Eco Casablanca: Cult movies & intertextual collage
27. Jean Baudrillard Simulacra & simulations
28. Luce Irigaray The bodily encounter with the mother
29. Patrocinio P Schweickart Reading ourselves: towards a feminist theory of reading
30. Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick The beast in the closet
31. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Feminism & critical theory
32. Stephen Greenblatt The circulation of social energy
33. Jerome McGann The textual condition
34. Index
35. B Contents arranged thematically
36. Formalist, structuralist & post-structuralist poetics, linguistics & narratology
37. Deconstruction
38. Psychoanalysis
39. Politics, ideology, cultural history
40. Feminism
41. Hermeneutics, reception theory, reader-response
42. Cognitive literary scholarship

Salient Features

• New essays covering emerging concerns in post-colonialism, gender studies, post-modern theories of communication, lesbian/gay criticism.
• Contains a selection of the most important and representative work from the major schools in contemporary criticism.
• Material has also been chosen for its international literary concerns.
• Introductions give a context for each essay.
• Footnotes help explain the most difficult references.
• The selection is ordered both historically and thematically, so that readers can identify for themselves links between essays.