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).

• 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

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.