Literary Theory and Criticism An Oxford Guide

by Waugh, Patricia

• ISBN13: 9780199258369
• ISBN10: 0199258368
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-03-16
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This volume offers a comprehensive account of modern literary criticism, presenting the field as part of an ongoing historical and intellectual tradition. Featuring thirty-nine specially commissioned chapters from an international team of esteemed contributors, it fills a large gap in the market by combining the accessibility of single-authored selections with a wide range of critical perspectives. The volume is divided into four parts. Part One covers the key philosophical and aesthetic origins of literary theory, while Part Two discusses 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.

Author Biography

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 and postmodernism, most recently The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (with David Fuller).

Table of Contents

List of contributors	xix
Introduction: criticism, theory, and anti-theory	1	(1)
Patricia Waugh
From the theory of literature to the theory revolution	1	(2)
Fear and loathing in literary studies: the seductions of `theory'	3	(6)
Literary theories and scientific theories	9	(6)
A homeopathic art: `theory' as the resistance to theory	15	(2)
The rise of theory	17	(5)
Before `theory': early to mid-twentieth-century criticism	22	(6)
The rise of the professional: criticism in the modern academy	28	(2)
The future of theory and criticism	30	(5)
Part I Concepts of criticism and aesthetic origins	35	(48)
Mimesis: ancient Greek literary theory	37	(11)
Andrea Nightingale
Mimesis	37	(2)
Fiction and falsehood	39	(2)
The audience	41	(3)
Catharsis	44	(2)
Further reading	46	(2)
Expressivity: the Romantic theory of authorship	48	(11)
Andrew Bennett
Expression	49	(1)
Confession	50	(1)
Composition	51	(3)
Inspiration	54	(1)
Imagination	55	(2)
Further reading	57	(2)
Interpretation: hermeneutics	59	(11)
Timothy Clark
The defence of non-theoretical understanding	60	(1)
Art and truth	61	(2)
Do texts have `objective' meanings?	63	(2)
Gadamer's defence of reading as freedom	65	(2)
Further reading	67	(3)
Value: criticism, canons, and evaluation	70	(13)
Patricia Waugh
The origin of canons	70	(3)
The test of time: reputation and value	73	(2)
For and against literary value-judgements	75	(2)
The containment of literature and the preservation of value	77	(2)
Postmodernism and the retreat from value	79	(1)
Further reading	80	(3)
Part II Criticism and critical practices in the twentieth century	83	(174)
Literature and the academy	85	(11)
Chris Baldick
Criticism incorporated	85	(2)
A brief prehistory	87	(4)
Modernism and the purification of criticism	91	(2)
Criticism decentred	93	(2)
Further reading	95	(1)
I. A. Richards	96	(11)
Ann Banfield
Intellectual contexts: Cambridge philosophy	97	(2)
The meaning of meaning	99	(2)
Principles of literary criticism	101	(1)
Practical criticism	102	(1)
Critical legacies	102	(3)
Further reading	105	(2)
T. S. Eliot and the idea of tradition	107	(12)
Gareth Reeves
`Tradition and the Individual Talent'---then and now	107	(1)
F. H. Bradley---the historical sense	108	(2)
Impersonality---the closet Romantic	110	(2)
Literary and socio---political hierarchies	112	(1)
Legacies: theory	113	(2)
Legacies: poetry	115	(2)
Further reading	117	(2)
Anthropology and/as myth in modern criticism	119	(11)
Michael Bell
`Myth' and `reason'	119	(2)
Varieties of Modernist mythopoeia	121	(2)
Literary anthropology	123	(3)
Structuralism and the breakup of Modernist mythopoeia	126	(1)
Myth and the marvellous	127	(2)
Further reading	129	(1)
F. R. Leavis: criticism and culture	130	(10)
Gary Day
Leavis's cultural criticism	131	(3)
Leavis and scientific management	134	(1)
Leavis's literary criticism	135	(3)
Further reading	138	(2)
Marxist aesthetics	140	(12)
Tony Davies
Marx before Marxism	140	(1)
Art, authorship, ideology	141	(2)
Base and superstructure	143	(1)
Marxism, realism, typicality	144	(2)
Art, antiquity, and modernity	146	(3)
Marxism since Marx	149	(1)
Further reading	150	(2)
William Empson: from verbal analysis to cultural criticism	152	(14)
David Fuller
Verbal analysis	152	(3)
Cultural criticism	155	(3)
Contra clerisies: moral criticism	158	(3)
The example of Empson	161	(2)
Further reading	163	(3)
The New Criticism	166	(11)
Stephen Matterson
Origins	168	(2)
Methods and characteristics	170	(2)
Influence and legacy	172	(3)
Further reading	175	(2)
The intentional fallacy	177	(12)
Peter Lamarque
The anti-intentionalist case	178	(5)
The intentionalist response	183	(4)
Further reading	187	(2)
Adorno and the Frankfurt School	189	(10)
Andrew Bowie
Historical origins of Critical Theory	190	(1)
Walter Benjamin	191	(3)
T. W. Adorno	194	(4)
Further reading	198	(1)
Freud and psychoanalysis	199	(13)
Celine Surprenant
The application of psychoanalysis to literary works	201	(1)
From contents to texts	202	(1)
`The Subtleties of a Faulty Action'	203	(1)
Correspondences between literary and unconscious processes	204	(2)
Language	206	(2)
Freud's theories	208	(1)
Further reading	209	(3)
The Russian debate on narrative	212	(11)
Gary Saul Morson
The Russian debate on culture	213	(1)
The formalist `science' of literature	214	(3)
Formalism and literary history	217	(1)
Bakhtin and `the surplus'	218	(1)
Bakhtin's theories of the novel	219	(4)
Bakhtin and the dialogic principle	223	(10)
Lynne Pearce
Polyphony	224	(2)
Dialogism	226	(3)
Heteroglossia	229	(1)
Carnival	230	(3)
Form, rhetoric, and intellectual history	233	(12)
Faiza W. Shereen
Historical background	234	(1)
A theoretical grounding	234	(2)
Key concepts in Chicago criticism	236	(2)
Trends in Chicago criticism	238	(5)
Further reading	243	(2)
Literature into culture: Cultural Studies after Leavis	245	(12)
Glenn Jordan
Chris Weedon
The development of cultural Studies	245	(4)
Interdisciplinarity/anti-disciplinarity	249	(2)
The internationalization of Cultural Studies	251	(3)
Further reading	254	(3)
Part III Literary theory: movements and schools	257	(216)
Structuralism and narrative poetics	259	(21)
Susana Onega
Saussure and structuralism	259	(1)
Ferdinand de Saussure	260	(2)
After Saussure	262	(3)
Barthes and structuralist poetics	265	(2)
Roland Barthes	267	(6)
Genette and narratology	273	(1)
Gerard Genette	274	(3)
Conclusion	277	(1)
Further reading	278	(2)
Psychoanalysis after Freud	280	(18)
Josiane Paccaud-Huguet
Jacques Lacan: desire and discourse	281	(6)
Jacques Lacan: jouissance and the letter	287	(7)
Slavoj Zizek: or life after psychoanalysis	294	(3)
Further reading	297	(1)
Deconstruction	298	(21)
Alex Thomson
What is deconstruction?	299	(2)
Deconstruction and post-structuralism	301	(2)
The deconstruction of metaphysics	303	(1)
Deconstruction and writing	304	(1)
Deconstruction, history, and politics	305	(2)
Deconstruction, literature, and philosophy	307	(2)
Romanticism and deconstruction	309	(1)
Literature and truth	310	(2)
Deconstruction and interpretation	312	(1)
Deconstruction and literature	313	(1)
Deconstruction and literary criticism	314	(3)
Further reading	317	(2)
Feminisms	319	(21)
Fiona Tolan
Simone de Beauvoir and the second wave	319	(3)
The essentialism debate	322	(3)
Literary feminisms	325	(7)
New French feminisms: Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray	332	(5)
Overview: from The Second Sex to Gender Trouble	337	(1)
Further reading	338	(2)
Postcolonialism	340	(22)
Elleke Boehmer
The `post' in postcolonial	340	(2)
Related political traditions	342	(1)
Movements and theories against empire	343	(2)
Frantz Fanon	345	(2)
Postcolonial nationalism and nations	347	(3)
Leading twentieth-century postcolonial thinkers	350	(7)
Theory in practice: postcolonial readings	357	(3)
Further reading	360	(2)
Race, Nation, and ethnicity	362	(24)
Kathleen Kerr
The theory of modernity	365	(1)
The Enlightenment context	366	(5)
Race and nation: nineteenth-century imperialism	371	(2)
Turn-of-the-century black consciousness in America	373	(1)
Du Bois and Booker T. Washington	374	(1)
Later twentieth-century cultural trends	375	(2)
Hybridity: Modernist	377	(2)
Hybridity: Postmodern	379	(2)
Multiculturalism and politics	381	(3)
Further reading	384	(2)
Reconstructing historicism	386	(19)
Paul Hamilton
A crisis for historicism	386	(2)
The `end of history' thesis	388	(2)
Reception theory and historicism	390	(4)
The aesthetic/historic nexus	394	(1)
Kojeve's snobbery	395	(4)
Allegories and collections	399	(2)
Historicism and Bergsonism	401	(2)
Further reading	403	(2)
Postmodernism	405	(22)
Chris Snipp-Walmsley
The evolution of postmodernism	405	(4)
Modernity, Modernism, postmodernity, and postmodernism	409	(2)
Postmodernism, post-structuralism, and neo-pragmatism	411	(2)
1968 and all that---the seeds of postmodernism	413	(2)
The `postmodern' Osbournes	415	(1)
Raising the roof---postmodern rhetoric and theory	416	(2)
The end of reason, or where reason ends---resistance to postmodernism	418	(2)
Postmodernism and the authority of time	420	(1)
Rushdie's ethical postmodernism---Haroun as a cautionary fable	421	(3)
Monty Python's life of postmodernism	424	(1)
Further reading	425	(2)
Sexualities	427	(24)
Tony Purvis
Problems of sexual identity	427	(3)
The sexualization of everyday life	430	(6)
Sexual `natures' and sexual `identities'	436	(2)
`Queer' theories?: epistemology, rhetoric, performativity	438	(5)
Sexuality and beyond	443	(5)
Further reading	448	(3)
Science and criticism: beyond the culture wars	451	(22)
Christopher Norris
Early stages: the `science and poetry' debate	451	(2)
Some versions of structuralism	453	(3)
From the `two cultures' to the Sokal affair	456	(4)
Science, literature, and `possible worlds'	460	(3)
Fiction, philosophy, and the quantum multiverse	463	(4)
Beyond the `two cultures'	467	(2)
Further reading	469	(4)
Part IV Futures and retrospects	473	(96)
Performing literary interpretation	475	(11)
K. M. Newton
Introduction	475	(2)
`Construing' as an interpretive method	477	(4)
Literary interpretation as performance	481	(2)
The ethics of performing interpretation	483	(1)
Further reading	484	(2)
The responsibilities of the writer	486	(11)
Sean Burke
Responsibility and unintended outcomes	488	(2)
The risk of writing	490	(1)
The origins of authorial agency	491	(1)
Creativity versus containment: the aesthetic defence	492	(3)
Further reading	495	(2)
Mixing memory and desire: psychoanalysis, psychology, and trauma theory	497	(11)
Roger Luckhurst
Defining trauma	498	(3)
Yale School trauma theory	501	(2)
Why trauma?	503	(3)
Further reading	506	(2)
Theories of the gaze	508	(11)
Jeremy Hawthorn
Origins	509	(1)
Laura Mulvey: `Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'	510	(1)
Michel Foucault and Jeremy Bentham's `Panopticon'	511	(1)
The gaze in interpersonal psychology	512	(1)
Extensions	513	(1)
Readings	514	(3)
Further reading	517	(2)
Anti-canon theory	519	(11)
David Punter
Foreign body	519	(2)
The post-colonial	521	(2)
The body	523	(2)
The ghostly	525	(2)
The Uncanny	527	(1)
Further reading	528	(2)
Environmentalism and ecocriticism	530	(14)
Richard Kerridge
Environmentalism	532	(3)
Ecology	535	(2)
Anthropocentrism and ecocentrism	537	(1)
Ecofeminism	537	(1)
Nature	538	(2)
Pastoral	540	(1)
Romanticism	540	(1)
Further reading	541	(3)
Cognitive literary criticism	544	(13)
Alan Richardson
Introduction	544	(1)
Cognitive rhetoric	545	(2)
Cognitive poetics	547	(2)
Cognitive narratology	549	(1)
Cognitive aesthetics of reception	550	(1)
Cognitive materialism	551	(2)
Evolutionary literary theory	553	(1)
Further reading	554	(3)
Writing excess: the poetic principle of post-literary culture	557	(12)
Scott Wilson
Equivalence	557	(3)
Axiomatic	560	(3)
Econopoiesis	563	(6)
Index	569