Literary Theory and Criticism

Patricia Waugh has published extensively in the field of modern fiction and criticism. She is the author of The Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Backgrounds (1995) and Revolutions of the Word: Intellectual Contexts for the Study of Modern Literature (1997). She has also edited a number of collections and anthologies of modern literary theory, postmodernism, and most recently, The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (with David Fuller).

The quality of essays is consistently high, with outstanding contributions by Timothy Clark on hermeneutics, Chris Baldick on criticism and the academy, Chris Snipp-Walmsley on post-modernism, and Sean Burke on the responsibilities of the writer.

• 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