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-theoryPatricia Waugh Part I Concepts of criticism and aesthetic origins 1. Mimesis: ancient Greek literary theory, Ann Nightingale 2. Expressivity: the Romantic theory of authorship, Andrew Bennett 3. Interpretation: hermeneutics, Timothy Clark 4. Value: criticism, canons, and evaluation, Patricia Waugh Part II Criticism and critical practices in the twentieth century 5. Literature and the academy, Chris Baldick 6. I. A. Richards, Ann Banfield 7. T. S. Eliot and the idea of tradition, Gareth Reeves 8. Anthropology, myth, and modern criticism, Michael Bell 9. F. R. Leavis: criticism and culture, Gary Day 10. Marxist aesthetics, Tony Davies 11. William Empson: from verbal analysis to cultural criticism, David Fuller 12. The New Criticism, Stephen Matterson 13. The intentional fallacy, Peter Lamarque 14. Adorno and the Frankfurt School, Andrew Bowie 15. Freud and psychoanalysis, Celine Surprenant 16. The Russian debate on narrative, Gary Saul Morson 17. Bakhtin and dialogics, Lynne Pearce 18. Form, rhetoric, and intellectual history, Faiza W. Shereen 19. Literature into culture: cultural studies after Leavis, Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon Part III Literary theory: movements and schools 20. Structuralism and narrative poetics, Susana Onega 21. Psychoanalysis after Freud, Josiane Paccaud-Huguet 22. Deconstruction, Alex Thompson 23. Feminisms, Fiona Tolann 24. Postcolonialism, Elleke Boehmer 25. Race, nation, and ethnicity, Kathleen Kerr 26. Reconstructing historicism, Paul Hamilton 27. Postmodernism, Chris Snipp-Walmsley 28. Sexualities, Tony Purvis 29. Science and criticism: beyond the culture wars, Christopher Norris Part IV Futures and retrospects 30. Performing literary interpretation, K. M. Newton 31. The responsibilities of the writer, Sean Burke 32. Mixing memory and desire: psychoanalysis, psychology, and trauma theory, Roger Luckhurst 33. Theories of the gaze, Jeremy Hawthorn 34. Anti-canon theory, David Punter 35. Environmentalism and ecocriticism, Richard Kerridge 36. Cognitive literary criticism, Alan Richardson 37. Writing excess: the poetic principle of post-literary culture, Scott Wilson Index