Table of Contents
Introduction ix
How to use this book xv
1 Aestheticism 1
The Pre-Raphaelites
Art for art's sake
Symbolism
Decadence
New aestheticism
2 Formalism 15
Practical criticism
The new criticism
Continental formalism
Defamiliarization
Formalism today
3 Reader response theory 29
Is there a text on this paper?
Rejecting formalism
Unaccceptable readings?
'Readerly' and 'writerly'
Reader response theory today
4 Marxism and post-Marxism 41
Base and superstructrure
Ideologies
The Frankfurt School
Post-Marxism
5 Structuralism 55
The elements of language
The sign
'The Death of the Author'
Denotations and connotations
Metaphor and metonymy
Narratology
6 Psychoanalytic criticism 69
Identity and the self
Jungian psychoanalysis
Lacanian psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis and literature
7 Modernism and surrealism 83
High modernism
Surrealism
When was/is modernism?
8 Existentialism 97
Life and truth
Nietzsche's Übermensch
Authenticity and bad faith
Absurdism
9 Poststructuralism 109
Language and reality
Deconstruction
Poststructuralist politics?
The heterotopia Intertextuality
Gilies Deleuze
10 Postmodernism 123
Postmodern culture
The simalcrum
Postmodern politics
Postmodern literature
Historiographic metafiction
Post-postmodernism
11 Feminist theory 137
First-wave feminism
Second-wave feminism
The rise of feminist literary theory
French feminist theory
Feminisms
Third-wave feminism and beyond
12 Queer theory 151
Dancing to your own tune
Queer
Compulsory heterosexuality
Gender performativity
Undoing gender
Queering literature
13 Postcolonial criticism 167
The Empire writes back
Postcolonial spaces
Postcolonial forms
Criticism of postcolonial theory
14 Cultural studies 181
What is culture?
Critiquing mass culture
Interdisciplinarity
Cultural identities
15 Historicisms and materialisms 195
Historicisms
Cultural materialism
New materialism
Decentring the human
Ergodic literature
16 Humanisms 209
Being human
Humanist ethics
Humanism and literature
17 Ethical criticism 221
The ethical text and morality
The ethical turn
Three ethical moments
Transversal poetics
18 Genre theory 235
The influence of Aristotle
The Chicago School
The Rhetoric of Fiction
The role of the reader
'Popular' literatures
19 Ecocriticism 247
Studying the earth
The death of nature
Critiquing the human
Conclusion 259
References 261
Index 275
Answers 287