This text offers a unique combination of British, European, American and Post-Colonial perspectives on literary study from the 1920s to the present day. Carefully introduced and arranged to highlight the development of debates, it is designed to engage newcomers to the field with some of the main themes and issues that will concern them as readers of modern literary texts of all genres. In the second edition, there is an increased focus on questions of gender and identity and on recent debates, such as 'Literature and Nation' and 'Literature and Value'. The reach and relevance of the book has been extended, taking a more international voice, focusing on American and European writers and critics.

General Introduction Part One: General Approaches I Questioning the Canon Introduction 1. Repossessing the Past: The Case for an Open Literary History, Marylin Butler 2. Canon and Period, Frank Kermode 3. Literature and the Rise of English, Terry Eagleton 4. Women Poets, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar 5. Literary Theory and the Black Tradition, Henry Louis Gates, Jnr. II Interpretation Introduction 1. The Babel of Interpretations, E. D. Hirsch, Jnr. 2. Interpreting the Variorium, Stanley Fish 3. Who Cares About the Text?, Robert Scholes 4. Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory, Hans Robert Jauss 5. The Interpreter's Freud, Geoffrey Hartman III Commitment Introduction 1. To Cambridge Women, Virginia Woolf 2. Writing, Reading, and the Public, Jean-Paul Sartre 3. Commitment, Theodor Adorno 4. Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature, Italo Calvino Part Two: Themes and Issues I Form and Genre Introduction 1. Story and Narrative, Seymour Chatman 2. Semiotics of Theatrical Performance, Umberto Eco 3. The Signs of Drama, Martin Esslin Close Reading, John Barrell II Modernisms Introduction 1. Remarks on Poetry, Paul Valery 2. Order in Narrative, Gerard Genette 3. Towards a Semiotics of Literature, Robert Scholes 4. The Ideology of Modernism, George Lukacs 5. Modernism and the Metropolis, Raymond Williams 6. Gender and Modernism, Bonnie Kime Scott III Literature and Nation Introduction 1. Beyond a Boundary, C. L. R. James 2. Woman and Nationalism, Virginia Woolf 3. The Intimate Enemy, Ashis Nandy 4. The National Longing for Form, Timothy Brennan 5. Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie IV Literature and Ideology Introduction 1. A Short Organum for the Theatre, Bertolt Brecht 2. Marxist Criticism, Terry Eagleton 3. The Text Says What It Does Not Say, Pierre Macherey 4. The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes 5. What is an Author?, Michel Foucault V Literature and Gender Introduction 1. Woman and the Other, Simone de Beauvoir 2. Language and Gender, Cora Kaplan 3. Laugh of the Medusa, Helene Cixous 4. Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation, Toni Morrison 5. Introduction to Between Men, Eve Kosovsky Sedgewick 6. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire, Judith Butler VI End of Empire Introduction 1. The Discourse of the Orient, Edward Said 2. Englands of the Mind, Seamus Heaney 3. Behind the Cliches of Contemporary Theatre, John McGrath 4. From the Victorian Nyanza to the Sheraton San Salvador, Mary Louise Pratt VII From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial Introduction 1. On National Culture, Frantz Fanon 2. Colonialist Criticism, Chinua Achebe 3. History of the Voice, Kamau Brathwaite 4. Post-Colonial Reconstruction, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin 5. The Angel of Progress, Anne McClintock 6. When Was The Post-Colonial?, Stuart Hall VIII Literature and History Introduction 1. Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin 2. History and Fiction, Laurence Lerner 3. Introduction to Metahistory, Hayden White 4. The Text, the Poem, and the Problem of Historical Method, Jerome McGann 5. The Keening Muse, Joseph Brodsky 6. The Hollow Miracle, George Steiner 7. Literary History and Literary Modernity, Paul de Man IX Literature and Value Introduction 1. What is a Classic, T. S. Eliot 2. The Exile of Evaluation, Barbara Hernstein Smith

Critical Essays and Documents Second Edition Edited by Denis Walder, Dept of Literature, Open University