Volume 8 of The History of Literary Criticism (the second to be published) deals with the most hotly debated areas of literary theory, including Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Semiotics, and Hermeneutics. Also incorporating a reflective chapter by Richard Rorty on Deconstruction, and culminating in accounts of the reader-oriented criticism of critics such as Stanley Fish, this is the first book to engage systematically with the history of the twentieth century's most profound and extensive set of cross-cultural intellectual movements.

his volume provides a thorough account of the critical tradition emerging with the modernist and avant-garde writers of the early twentieth century (Eliot, Pound, Stein, Yeats), continuing with the New Critics (Richards, Empson, Burke, Winters), and feeding into the influential work of Leavis, Trilling and others. The book provides a companion to the other twentieth-century volumes of The  History of Literary Criticism, and offers a systematic and stimulating coverage of the development of the key literary-critical movements, genres, and individual critics.

This latest volume in the celebrated  History of Literary Criticism addresses literary criticism of the Romantic period, chiefly in Europe. Its seventeen chapters are by internationally respected academics and explore a range of key topics and themes. The book is designed to help readers locate essential information and to develop approaches and viewpoints for a deeper understanding of issues discussed by Romantic critics or that were fundamental to their works. Primary and secondary bibliographies provide a guide for further research.

This book presents the key critical concepts in literary studies today, avoiding the jargonistic, abstract nature of much `theory'. The authors explore crucial issues in contemporary criticism and theory by focusing closely on a range of texts, from Chaucer to Achebe and from Milton to Morrison.

The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece

By "literary criticism" we usually mean a self-conscious act involving the technical and aesthetic appraisal, by individuals, of autonomous works of art. Aristotle and Plato come to mind. The word "social" does not. Yet, as this book shows, it should-if, that is, we wish to understand where literary criticism as we think of it today came from.