Literary Theory and Criticism An Oxford Guide

by Waugh, Patricia

• ISBN13: 9780199291335
• ISBN10: 0199291330
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-01-11
• 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

Philosophical and Aesthetic Origins

Literature and the Problem of Representation

Canons and Values

The Romantic Author

Hermeneutics

Twentieth Century Critics and Criticism

Literature and the Academy

T.S. Eliot and the Idea of Tradition

F.R. Leavis, Scrutiny and the Idea of Mass Society

Literature and Myth

Freud and Psychoanalysis

Virginia Woolf

Adorno and the Frankfurt School

Marxist Aesthetics

Cultural Studies after Leavis

Practical Criticism in England

The New Criticism

William Empson and Ambiguity

The Russian Debate on Narrative

The Intentional Fallacy

Rhetoric, reading and intellectual history

Bakhtin and the ideal of a dialogue poetics

Linguistic Criticism

Modern Literary Theory

Structuralism and Narratology

Deconstruction

Feminisms

Sexual Identities

Reconstructing History

Postcolonialism

Race, Nation and Ethnicity

Psychoanalysis

Postmodernism

Future Directions

Environmentalism and Eco-Criticism

Cognitive Literary Criticism

Criticism and Science Wars

Theories of the Gaze

Mixing Memory and Desire

Criticism and Authorial Experience

Foreign Bodies and Border-Guards

The Writing of Excess

Performing Literacy Interpretation

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