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What is feminism? "Simply the belief that women should be as free as men . . . Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are."

Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman is firm, delightfully firm, on many things - heels (against), pubic waxing (against), abortion (for), the disadvantages of economising on sanitary products - and she is firm, she insists on, this simple definition of feminism. Feminism is just equality. Would a man be allowed to do it? Then so should you. Would a man feel bad about it? No? Then nor should you. Everything else - the pressure to be sisterly ("When did feminism become confused with Buddhism?"); the idea that we should be held to account, as feminists, for every possible ill that could befall the modern woman ("There's a whole generation of people who've confused 'feminism' with 'anything to do with women'") - all of that is just hassle in disguise.

Moran is right, it is simple: and yet, for such a simple message, its cultural penetration has been patchy, fluctuating and disappointing. People who like to sound the death knell for the ideology - it's remarkable even that such people still exist - point to the fact that young women tend not to describe themselves as feminists. There is a certain sour enjoyment from pointing out all the privileges that they owe to the sisterhood - the equal pay, the maternity leave - but I would query the importance of the self-description. One can promulgate the values of feminism quite effectively by just living them, by expecting fairness at work and at home, and young women are better at this, less surrendered, than anyone. Much more chilling for me was the recent debate around the Slut Walks. On mainstream television ( Newsnight) the Conservative MP Louise Bagshawe said that the word "slut" could never be reclaimed, would always be a horrible word, because it "lionised promiscuity". Meanwhile, in mainstream print (the Sunday Times), columnist Minette Marrin wrote: "There is no universal human right to dress and behave like a sluttish streetwalker touting for sex, without occasionally being taken for one." These are not young women; they have been many years in this culture, without apparently encountering feminism's basic precepts. It ought to be taken as given, by now, that you can object to promiscuity generally, if you like, and I imagine this would be on faith grounds, but if you object to promiscuity in women, specifically, then you are barking up the wrong skirt. It ought to be obvious, beyond remarking, that a woman should be able to sleep with whom she wants, when she wants, as often as she wants, without danger and without shame. It surely should go without saying that being a prostitute and being raped are two different activities. The fact that so little progress has been made in the specific area of female sexuality is partly because of divisions within feminism - many of the boldest voices see the Slut business as a post-modern stunt, where sexual violence is used as a stalking horse to co-opt young women into hot pants and thence into the raunch culture that oppresses them further. Sylvia Walby, in her new book, The Future of Feminism, adjudicates on this magisterially. But divisions alone cannot account for this.

The best explanation I have read comes from Walby's account of the relevant "epistemic community", a term which is defined by Peter Haas as "a network of professionals with recognised expertise and competence in a particular domain . . . who have 1) a shared set of normative and principled beliefs . . . 2) shared causal beliefs, which are derived from their analysis . . . 3) a shared notion of validity and 4) a common policy enterprise". Such a community is the means by which ideas become practices and norms. The patriarchy isn't going to smash itself, to paraphrase Habermas (sort of), but nor is it so entrenched that it cannot be overturned by sustained, informed argumentation. This accounts for the huge advances that feminism has made - consider the daunting economic inequality that has been tackled in the past four decades, the astonishing speed of equal pay legislation across Europe and indeed the world. But it also accounts for the relatively meagre differences wrought in the arena of sexuality, because the epistemic community isn't there, the argument was never sustained. The last person to make any serious noise about female sexuality was Shere Hite; that was nearly 35 years ago. Orgasms were the stuff of the academy and of politics in the 1970s, but now, to go anywhere near that stuff would be a fast and effective way to sound like a crank.

I was expecting to find some tension between the dual purposes of memoir and polemic in Moran's book, but in fact, every word of the memoir is loaded with political importance. Female sexuality needs women to talk about sex, intelligently, out loud and in public (not just on Mumsnet) or it will forever remain a source of shame. Moran has been a columnist since she was a teenager, and while she has always been idiosyncratic, I'm not sure that I would have described her as radical. But there is iconoclasm lurking under every one-liner. I realised I have never read an account of someone's period starting. The closest I can even think of is Sarah Silverman's memoir about wetting the bed. I have never read a woman writing about wanking while fantasising about Chevy Chase (or anyone else; Chevy isn't the radical bit, here, although I do now see him in a whole new light). I have never read a sentence like this: "There is a great deal of pleasure to be had in a proper, furry muff . . . Lying in a hammock, gently finger-combing your Wookiee whilst staring up at the sky is one of the great pleasures of adulthood." I have read some of Moran's arguments about porn (though none so comically expressed); other insights are so shiny, neat, self-evidently right that it was like she was potting a snooker ball in my brain. This one about binge eating is an example:

"Overeating is the addiction choice of carers, and that's why it's come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It's a way of fucking yourself up whilst still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren't indulging in the 'luxury' of their addiction making them useless, chaotic or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn't inconvenience anyone. And that's why it's so often a woman's addiction of choice. All the quietly eating mums. All the KitKats in office drawers. All the unhappy moments, late at night, caught only in the fridge-light."

Structurally, the argument-told-as-memoir is not easy to pull off. A life told in comic episodes will not arrange itself neatly along feminist or any other ideological lines. The exigencies of the argument mean that the chapters have a very different emotional weight, so that the one on abortion is nothing like the thumping heart of the one on menstruation. The prose is columnistic, in that it's quite informal and very conversational; the sensation of having Moran in your house can be uncanny. But essentially, she's a comedian; her cadence is comic, her punctuation is comic, her wordplay is mischievous, and all this before you even touch on her observations. The irresistible pull of self-parody gives each paragraph a gravitational urgency. "I am a virgin and I don't play sport, or move heavy objects, or go anywhere or do anything, and so my body is this vast, sleeping, pale thing. There it is, standing awkwardly in the mirror, looking like it's waiting to receive bad news. It is the bad news." She can be funny in a terse, edgy way: "In those days, the music scene was much like Auschwitz. There were no birds. You couldn't find a woman making music for love nor money." She can be funny in a more expansive, absurdist way: "The problem with the word 'vagina' is that vaginas seem to be just straight-out bad luck. Only a masochist would want one, because only awful things happen to them. Vaginas get torn. Vaginas get 'examined'. Evidence is found in them. Serial killers leave things in them, to taunt Morse . . . No one wants one of those."

Page for page, my favourite chapter is "I Am in Love!" It's purportedly a story about falling in love with an unpleasant man, but I read it as a love letter to sisterhood, with a small "s"; a love letter to her actual sister, Caz. But in terms of changing the world, the momentous thing is to talk so freely about her body and its functions, in "a culture where", she says, "nearly everything female is still seen as squeam-inducing and/or weak". Germaine Greer, in a review that was warm but a bit salty, like sperm (sorry, I am essaying a new sexual openness - it is not as easy as it looks), ends: "More disconcerting is the way that Moran revisits themes that I have written thousands of words about, and even made TV documentaries about, the C-word and pornography for two, and restates my case in pretty much the same terms, with not the faintest suspicion that anyone has ever said any such things ever before." One can see how irritating this would be from Greer's perspective, and also how much it would have ruined Moran's momentum to have to finish everything pace Germaine. But what makes this book important is something unique to Caitlin Moran; she and Greer have both attacked the elemental shame attached to being a woman, but where Greer was furious, Moran sloughs it off with exuberance. There is a courage in this book that is born, not made, and not borrowed, either. It is vital in both senses.

In her prologue, Moran bemoans the fact that the women's revolution "had somehow shrunk down into a couple of increasingly small arguments, carried out between a couple of dozen feminist academics, in books that only feminist academics would read". Sylvia Walby, Unesco chair in gender research at Lancaster University, would probably concede that her audience is small, but would trenchantly contest that her arguments are small too. Hers is a densely written book, whose propositions proceed from one to another with the unforgiving directness of a quadratic equation. If you need a bit of breathing space, you can do it in your own time. It repays the effort, though, in the following ways. First, she addresses raunch culture or, if you prefer "post-feminism", which preoccupies and, I sometimes think, mires feminists, often creating discord between the second and third wave that needn't exist. "Raunch culture," Walby writes, "is bound up with the neoliberal turn, with its commercialised and competitive approach to intimacy. The alternative social democratic form is based on mutuality and equality. Hence, a celebration of innovation and experimentation in intimacy and sexuality, in the context of mutualism and equality, is aligned with feminism, while competitive commercialised sex is not." This is the message I take from that - though Walby, enemy of the broad brush stroke, would probably correct me: do what you want, girls, so long as you do want it. So long as it's in the service of your own sexual pleasure, and not to score some competitive advantage by manipulating the pleasure of someone else.

Walby takes great care to examine what we might call the disappearance of feminism, demonstrating that its change in nature has led to a change in visibility - far from having failed, this new low profile is actually testament to its "intersectionality". Again, I am putting this crudely, but feminism started out as a protest movement, so made a lot of noise; a process of persuasion has put feminists and their aims at or near the centre of governments, in many countries, so of course the protest element has been largely replaced by constructive, fruitful political engagement, which takes place with much less fanfare. She reminds us of so much that has been achieved, and alerts us to changes in gender equality architecture at a European level that would make Richard Littlejohn's eyes pop out. She explores the ways in which feminism can work with other aims, what the crossover is between feminism and environmentalism, and what the implications are of the financial crisis. But the strongest message of this book is that neoliberalism "makes the achievement of feminist goals more difficult. The increase in economic inequality and the decrease in the legitimacy of state action alter the context in which feminism makes its demands."

Her writing style is so restrained and so disciplined, that it takes some time to realise the impact of what she is saying: first, that feminism cannot thrive against a wider backdrop of inequality, and second, that feminists have a duty to more than just women. We are a battalion in a wider fight against the trend towards inequality. I found this a heartening and timely book, a proof against demoralisation, a warning against internecine splits. I also changed my mind about various things - unions, for one (they were somewhat slow off the mark in taking women seriously as a force worth allying with; but Walby shows these alliances were, and always will be, crucial); quotas, for another. It's interesting that Moran, from a totally different direction, arrives at roughly the same place - that quotas are a good thing. She says about sexism: "I don't really see it as men vs women at all. What I see, instead, is winner vs loser. Most sexism is down to men being accustomed to us being the losers. That's what the problem is. We just have bad status." The endpoint of both these very different books is that feminism has no meaning unless it's tied to a belief in equality overall.

The editor of Granta magazine, I dare to hope, when calling the latest edition"The F-Word" is referring to "female" rather than "feminist". If not, he has fallen into that GCSE syllogism: this book is about women; women are feminists; ergo this book is about feminism. Caroline Moorehead's "A Train in Winter", which describes the arrival of 230 French female resistance fighters in Birkenau, does seem to be attempting a feminist angle on the Holocaust at one point: "Block elders [were] for the most part German criminal prisoners who effectively collaborated with the SS and whose own survival depended on brutality. Their viciousness and vindictiveness was said to surpass by far that of their male counterparts." It's an interesting story, sensitively written, but a) this sounds suspiciously like one of those Daily Mail observations -"isn't it amazing that it's often women who bully other women?" - which, frankly, is not very feminist and b) I think it's pushing it to present the Nazis or any of their works as an outrage against women. Their brutality seems to have been fairly even-handed, or if it wasn't, the men surely suffered enough not to be presented as the winners of the atrocity. Julie Otsuka's "The Children" is a wonderful, mellow, seamless tale of first-generation Japanese immigrants to America. The most overtly feminist pieces include AS Byatt's "No Grls Alod. Insept Mom" (a notice attached to her five-year-old grandson's door), a short inventory of clubs she'd encountered that wouldn't allow girls or women. And Rachel Cusk's "Aftermath", a tantalising excerpt from her divorce memoir, which comes out next year.

Cusk's characterisation of feminism starts strangely: "Then again, the feminist is supposed to hate men. She scorns the physical and emotional servitude. She calls them the enemy." This isn't a sophisticated reading of feminism, so the author is clearly ascribing this belief to someone other than herself. But to whom? To mainstream society? To the past? To her soon-to-be ex-husband? I felt foolish not knowing, but then it struck me that it didn't matter. Why start a conversation about ideas with what a mistaken person thinks? Why not start with what you think? The next paragraph brings us, it seems, closer to Cusk's territory: "I suppose a feminist wouldn't get married. She wouldn't have a joint bank account or a house in joint names. She might not have children, either . . . I shouldn't have called myself a feminist because what I said didn't match with what I was."

Again, these definitions are curious. There is an argument that marriage reinforces the patriarchy, but there is no precept in feminism against sharing your wages. If you object to money or property held in common, that's not feminism, that's possessive individualism (the two are confused with one another, but not often on this subject). And a vision of feminism that involves eschewing reproduction altogether is like a vision of environmentalism that involves ending reproduction: it might work, but it would have the iatrogenic consequence of species suicide. This is not standard feminism; nobody would try to live by it. This is separatist feminism, the sort that makes young women say "I'm not a feminist".

This was written in fresh anger; Cusk is still very much in the throes of de-marriage. Aside from the confused versions of feminism - and the contortions do seem to be down to the splenetic mood - there are elements that are really indefensible from the husband's point of view, unless his return were to be added as an appendix. Cusk writes: "My husband believed that I had treated him monstrously. This belief of his couldn't be shaken; his whole world depended on it." It leaves the strong impression that she has plenty of beliefs of her own that she doesn't want shaken, and yet she has "come to hate stories. If someone were to ask me what disaster this was that had befallen my life, I might ask if they wanted the story or the truth." He, in this version, is blinded by his need for a narrative, while she plugs directly into the truth. It's a little bit partial. At one point, she describes their family situation - her husband gave up work to look after their daughters - as the result of her unwillingness to play the maternal role. This "cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. It reflected nothing about me: its literature and practices, its values, its codes of conduct, its aesthetic were not mine." And so she "conscripted" her husband into the care of the children. Less than a minute later (in reading time), a solicitor told her she would have to continue supporting her husband, financially, when they split up. "But he's a qualified lawyer, I said. And I'm just a writer. What I meant was, he's a man. And I'm just a woman . . . the solicitor raised her slender eyebrows, gave me a bitter little smile. Well, then he knew exactly what he was doing, she said." Whether she imputes that view to the solicitor or not, Cusk still wants it both ways: we're asked to imagine her ex as such a magnificent lawyer that he managed to make her feel as though she were conscripting him, when all along, they were working to his long-game. Her feelings of maternal alienation were, in this version, a confection of his, with the aim of divorcing her some years down the line and pinching half her salary. Not since we met Heathcliff have readers been presented with an anti-hero whose grudges are so intricately prosecuted.

But she's like a lion, depositing a trophy kill: you might feel a bit queasy about it from some angles, but there is so much meat here. "Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude," she writes, distilling that awkwardness between couples, especially between parents, the tightrope between being put-upon and beholden. There is something marvellous, even monumental, about her honesty, the unabashed importance she attaches to every event: "I went to Paris for two days with my husband, determined while I was there to have my hair cut in a French salon. Wasn't this what women did? Well, I wanted to be womanised; I wanted someone to restore to me my lost femininity. A male hairdresser cut off all my hair, giggling as he did it, amusing himself during a boring afternoon at the salon by giving a tired blank-faced mother of two something punky and nouvelle vague. Afterwards, I wandered in the Paris streets, anxiously catching my reflection in shop windows. Had a transformation occurred, or a defacement? I wasn't sure. My husband wasn't sure either. It seemed terrible that between us we couldn't establish the truth." There is a topnote of derision for her own sex ("wasn't this what women did?") that is a much more likely wellspring than Cusk's divorce for her suspicions over whether or not she is still a feminist. But sisterliness and feminism have never been interchangeable; they are less so now than ever, as the expansion of our choices has shaped us into so many varieties.

Her final paragraph is evocative to an almost supernatural degree: "I begin to notice, looking in through those imaginary brightly lit windows, that the people inside are looking out. I see the women, these wives and mothers, looking out. They seem happy enough, contented enough, capable enough: they are well dressed, attractive, standing around with their men and their children. Yet they look around, their mouths moving. It is as though they are missing something or wondering about something. I remember it so well, what it was to be one of them. Sometimes one of these glances will pass over me and our eyes will briefly meet. And I realise she can't see me, this woman whose eyes have locked with mine. It isn't that she doesn't want to, or is trying not to. It's just that inside it's so bright and outside it's so dark, and so she can't see out, can't see anything at all."

Cusk gazes at herself unblinkingly, and judges harshly what she sees. But to call herself not a feminist? Hahaha. Of course she's one.

* This article was amended on 28 June 2011, correcting the spelling of Shere Hite
Topics

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Feminism in the 21st century | Zoe Williams

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What is feminism? "Simply the belief that women should be as free as men . . . Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are." Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman is firm, delightfully firm, on many things - heels (against), pubic waxing (against), abortion (for), the disadvantages of economising on sanitary products - and she is firm, she insists on, this simple definition of feminism.

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Basic level for students

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It began, of course, with Freud. Psychoanalysis refers both to a theory of how the mind works and a treatment modality. In recent years, both have yielded to more research-driven approaches, but psychoanalysis is still a thriving field and deals with subjective experience in ways that other therapies sometimes do not.

Belief in such hallmarks of Freudian thinking as the primacy of the unconscious fantasy, sexual desires (libido, penis envy, Oedipal complex), and dreams has wavered. But Freud also identified such basic mental maneuvers as transference, projection, and defensiveness, and demonstrated how they distort functioning. As a treatment based on extended self-exploration, psychoanalysis has evolved beyond the silent-shrink stereotype.

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It began, of course, with Freud. Psychoanalysis refers both to a theory of how the mind works and a treatment modality. In recent years, both have yielded to more research-driven approaches, but psychoanalysis is still a thriving field and deals with subjective experience in ways that other therapies sometimes do not.

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Emma Watson to United Nations: I'm a feminist

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Brief History of Western Feminism (Susie screencast)

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Brief History of Western Feminism (Susie screencast)

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An overview of Western feminism from first to third wave. Created for July Fast Track students 2015.

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Overview of theories with timeline overlap

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Overview of theories with timeline overlap

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Searchable links

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Copyright ©2021 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. This website collects and publishes the ideas of individuals who have contributed those ideas in their capacities as faculty-mentored student scholars. The materials collected here do not express the views of, or positions held by, Purdue University. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use. Privacy policy.

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Copyright ©2021 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. This website collects and publishes the ideas of individuals who have contributed those ideas in their capacities as faculty-mentored student scholars.

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Searchable links

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"Literary theory" is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools, by which we attempt to understand literature. All literary interpretation draws on a basis in theory but can serve as a justification for very different kinds of critical activity. It is literary theory that formulates the relationship between author and work; literary theory develops the significance of race, class, and gender for literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography of the author and an analysis of their thematic presence within texts. Literary theory offers varying approaches for understanding the role of historical context in interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and unconscious elements of the text. Literary theorists trace the history and evolution of the different genres-narrative, dramatic, lyric-in addition to the more recent emergence of the novel and the short story, while also investigating the importance of formal elements of literary structure. Lastly, literary theory in recent years has sought to explain the degree to which the text is more the product of a culture than an individual author and in turn how those texts help to create the culture.

Table of Contents

1. What Is Literary Theory?

2. Traditional Literary Criticism

3. Formalism and New Criticism

4. Marxism and Critical Theory

5. Structuralism and Poststructuralism

6. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

7. Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism

8. Gender Studies and Queer Theory

9. Cultural Studies

10. References and Further Reading

1. What Is Literary Theory?

"Literary theory," sometimes designated "critical theory," or "theory," and now undergoing a transformation into "cultural theory" within the discipline of literary studies, can be understood as the set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting literary texts. Literary theory refers to any principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts or from knowledge external to the text that can be applied in multiple interpretive situations. All critical practice regarding literature depends on an underlying structure of ideas in at least two ways: theory provides a rationale for what constitutes the subject matter of criticism-"the literary"-and the specific aims of critical practice-the act of interpretation itself. For example, to speak of the "unity" of Oedipus the King explicitly invokes Aristotle's theoretical statements on poetics. To argue, as does Chinua Achebe, that Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness fails to grant full humanity to the Africans it depicts is a perspective informed by a postcolonial literary theory that presupposes a history of exploitation and racism. Critics that explain the climactic drowning of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening as a suicide generally call upon a supporting architecture of feminist and gender theory. The structure of ideas that enables criticism of a literary work may or may not be acknowledged by the critic, and the status of literary theory within the academic discipline of literary studies continues to evolve.

Literary theory and the formal practice of literary interpretation runs a parallel but less well known course with the history of philosophy and is evident in the historical record at least as far back as Plato. The Cratylus contains a Plato's meditation on the relationship of words and the things to which they refer. Plato's skepticism about signification, i.e., that words bear no etymological relationship to their meanings but are arbitrarily "imposed," becomes a central concern in the twentieth century to both "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism." However, a persistent belief in "reference," the notion that words and images refer to an objective reality, has provided epistemological (that is, having to do with theories of knowledge) support for theories of literary representation throughout most of Western history. Until the nineteenth century, Art, in Shakespeare's phrase, held "a mirror up to nature" and faithfully recorded an objectively real world independent of the observer.

Modern literary theory gradually emerges in Europe during the nineteenth century. In one of the earliest developments of literary theory, German "higher criticism" subjected biblical texts to a radical historicizing that broke with traditional scriptural interpretation. "Higher," or "source criticism," analyzed biblical tales in light of comparable narratives from other cultures, an approach that anticipated some of the method and spirit of twentieth century theory, particularly "Structuralism" and "New Historicism." In France, the eminent literary critic Charles AugustinSaint Beuve maintained that a work of literature could be explained entirely in terms of biography, while novelist Marcel Proust devoted his life to refuting Saint Beuve in a massive narrative in which he contended that the details of the life of the artist are utterly transformed in the work of art. (This dispute was taken up anew by the French theorist Roland Barthes in his famous declaration of the "Death of the Author." See "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism.") Perhaps the greatest nineteenth century influence on literary theory came from the deep epistemological suspicion of Friedrich Nietzsche: that facts are not facts until they have been interpreted. Nietzsche's critique of knowledge has had a profound impact on literary studies and helped usher in an era of intense literary theorizing that has yet to pass.

Attention to the etymology of the term "theory," from the Greek "theoria," alerts us to the partial nature of theoretical approaches to literature. "Theoria" indicates a view or perspective of the Greek stage. This is precisely what literary theory offers, though specific theories often claim to present a complete system for understanding literature. The current state of theory is such that there are many overlapping areas of influence, and older schools of theory, though no longer enjoying their previous eminence, continue to exert an influence on the whole. The once widely-held conviction (an implicit theory) that literature is a repository of all that is meaningful and ennobling in the human experience, a view championed by the Leavis School in Britain, may no longer be acknowledged by name but remains an essential justification for the current structure of American universities and liberal arts curricula. The moment of "Deconstruction" may have passed, but its emphasis on the indeterminacy of signs (that we are unable to establish exclusively what a word means when used in a given situation) and thus of texts, remains significant. Many critics may not embrace the label "feminist," but the premise that gender is a social construct, one of theoretical feminisms distinguishing insights, is now axiomatic in a number of theoretical perspectives.

While literary theory has always implied or directly expressed a conception of the world outside the text, in the twentieth century three movements-"Marxist theory" of the Frankfurt School, "Feminism," and "Postmodernism"-have opened the field of literary studies into a broader area of inquiry. Marxist approaches to literature require an understanding of the primary economic and social bases of culture since Marxist aesthetic theory sees the work of art as a product, directly or indirectly, of the base structure of society. Feminist thought and practice analyzes the production of literature and literary representation within the framework that includes all social and cultural formations as they pertain to the role of women in history. Postmodern thought consists of both aesthetic and epistemological strands. Postmodernism in art has included a move toward non-referential, non-linear, abstract forms; a heightened degree of self-referentiality; and the collapse of categories and conventions that had traditionally governed art. Postmodern thought has led to the serious questioning of the so-called metanarratives of history, science, philosophy, and economic and sexual reproduction. Under postmodernity, all knowledge comes to be seen as "constructed" within historical self-contained systems of understanding. Marxist, feminist, and postmodern thought have brought about the incorporation of all human discourses (that is, interlocking fields of language and knowledge) as a subject matter for analysis by the literary theorist. Using the various poststructuralist and postmodern theories that often draw on disciplines other than the literary-linguistic, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and philosophical-for their primary insights, literary theory has become an interdisciplinary body of cultural theory. Taking as its premise that human societies and knowledge consist of texts in one form or another, cultural theory (for better or worse) is now applied to the varieties of texts, ambitiously undertaking to become the preeminent model of inquiry into the human condition.

Literary theory is a site of theories: some theories, like "Queer Theory," are "in;" other literary theories, like "Deconstruction," are "out" but continue to exert an influence on the field. "Traditional literary criticism," "New Criticism," and "Structuralism" are alike in that they held to the view that the study of literature has an objective body of knowledge under its scrutiny. The other schools of literary theory, to varying degrees, embrace a postmodern view of language and reality that calls into serious question the objective referent of literary studies. The following categories are certainly not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive, but they represent the major trends in literary theory of this century.

2. Traditional Literary Criticism

Academic literary criticism prior to the rise of "New Criticism" in the United States tended to practice traditional literary history: tracking influence, establishing the canon of major writers in the literary periods, and clarifying historical context and allusions within the text. Literary biography was and still is an important interpretive method in and out of the academy; versions of moral criticism, not unlike the Leavis School in Britain, and aesthetic (e.g. genre studies) criticism were also generally influential literary practices. Perhaps the key unifying feature of traditional literary criticism was the consensus within the academy as to the both the literary canon (that is, the books all educated persons should read) and the aims and purposes of literature. What literature was, and why we read literature, and what we read, were questions that subsequent movements in literary theory were to raise.

3. Formalism and New Criticism

"Formalism" is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that emphasizes literary form and the study of literary devices within the text. The work of the Formalists had a general impact on later developments in "Structuralism" and other theories of narrative. "Formalism," like "Structuralism," sought to place the study of literature on a scientific basis through objective analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques, and other "functions" that comprise the literary work. The Formalists placed great importance on the literariness of texts, those qualities that distinguished the literary from other kinds of writing. Neither author nor context was essential for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the "hero-function," for example, that had meaning. Form was the content. A plot device or narrative strategy was examined for how it functioned and compared to how it had functioned in other literary works. Of the Russian Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky are probably the most well known.

The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was "to make the stones stonier" nicely expresses their notion of literariness. "Formalism" is perhaps best known is Shklovsky's concept of "defamiliarization." The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky contended, rendered invisible the uniqueness and particularity of the objects of existence. Literary language, partly by calling attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar and made fresh the experience of daily life.

The "New Criticism," so designated as to indicate a break with traditional methods, was a product of the American university in the 1930s and 40s. "New Criticism" stressed close reading of the text itself, much like the French pedagogical precept "explication du texte." As a strategy of reading, "New Criticism" viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object independent of historical context and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility of the artist. T.S. Eliot, though not explicitly associated with the movement, expressed a similar critical-aesthetic philosophy in his essays on John Donne and the metaphysical poets, writers who Eliot believed experienced a complete integration of thought and feeling. New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and W.K. Wimsatt placed a similar focus on the metaphysical poets and poetry in general, a genre well suited to New Critical practice. "New Criticism" aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigor to literary studies, confining itself to careful scrutiny of the text alone and the formal structures of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, among others. "New Criticism" was fired by the conviction that their readings of poetry would yield a humanizing influence on readers and thus counter the alienating tendencies of modern, industrial life. "New Criticism" in this regard bears an affinity to the Southern Agrarian movement whose manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, contained essays by two New Critics, Ransom and Warren. Perhaps the enduring legacy of "New Criticism" can be found in the college classroom, in which the verbal texture of the poem on the page remains a primary object of literary study.

4. Marxism and Critical Theory

Marxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class conflict as well as the reinforcement of class distinctions through the medium of literature. Marxist theorists use traditional techniques of literary analysis but subordinate aesthetic concerns to the final social and political meanings of literature. Marxist theorist often champion authors sympathetic to the working classes and authors whose work challenges economic equalities found in capitalist societies. In keeping with the totalizing spirit of Marxism, literary theories arising from the Marxist paradigm have not only sought new ways of understanding the relationship between economic production and literature, but all cultural production as well. Marxist analyses of society and history have had a profound effect on literary theory and practical criticism, most notably in the development of "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism."

The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs contributed to an understanding of the relationship between historical materialism and literary form, in particular with realism and the historical novel. Walter Benjamin broke new ground in his work in his study of aesthetics and the reproduction of the work of art. The Frankfurt School of philosophers, including most notably Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse-after their emigration to the United States-played a key role in introducing Marxist assessments of culture into the mainstream of American academic life. These thinkers became associated with what is known as "Critical theory," one of the constituent components of which was a critique of the instrumental use of reason in advanced capitalist culture. "Critical theory" held to a distinction between the high cultural heritage of Europe and the mass culture produced by capitalist societies as an instrument of domination. "Critical theory" sees in the structure of mass cultural forms-jazz, Hollywood film, advertising-a replication of the structure of the factory and the workplace. Creativity and cultural production in advanced capitalist societies were always already co-opted by the entertainment needs of an economic system that requires sensory stimulation and recognizable cliché and suppressed the tendency for sustained deliberation.

The major Marxist influences on literary theory since the Frankfurt School have been Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton in Great Britain and Frank Lentricchia and Fredric Jameson in the United States. Williams is associated with the New Left political movement in Great Britain and the development of "Cultural Materialism" and the Cultural Studies Movement, originating in the 1960s at Birmingham University's Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Eagleton is known both as a Marxist theorist and as a popularizer of theory by means of his widely read overview, Literary Theory. Lentricchia likewise became influential through his account of trends in theory, After the New Criticism. Jameson is a more diverse theorist, known both for his impact on Marxist theories of culture and for his position as one of the leading figures in theoretical postmodernism. Jameson's work on consumer culture, architecture, film, literature and other areas, typifies the collapse of disciplinary boundaries taking place in the realm of Marxist and postmodern cultural theory. Jameson's work investigates the way the structural features of late capitalism-particularly the transformation of all culture into commodity form-are now deeply embedded in all of our ways of communicating.

5. Structuralism and Poststructuralism

Like the "New Criticism," "Structuralism" sought to bring to literary studies a set of objective criteria for analysis and a new intellectual rigor. "Structuralism" can be viewed as an extension of "Formalism" in that that both "Structuralism" and "Formalism" devoted their attention to matters of literary form (i.e. structure) rather than social or historical content; and that both bodies of thought were intended to put the study of literature on a scientific, objective basis. "Structuralism" relied initially on the ideas of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Like Plato, Saussure regarded the signifier (words, marks, symbols) as arbitrary and unrelated to the concept, the signified, to which it referred. Within the way a particular society uses language and signs, meaning was constituted by a system of "differences" between units of the language. Particular meanings were of less interest than the underlying structures of signification that made meaning itself possible, often expressed as an emphasis on "langue" rather than "parole." "Structuralism" was to be a metalanguage, a language about languages, used to decode actual languages, or systems of signification. The work of the "Formalist" Roman Jakobson contributed to "Structuralist" thought, and the more prominent Structuralists included Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Tzvetan Todorov, A.J. Greimas, Gerard Genette, and Barthes.

The philosopher Roland Barthes proved to be a key figure on the divide between "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism." "Poststructuralism" is less unified as a theoretical movement than its precursor; indeed, the work of its advocates known by the term "Deconstruction" calls into question the possibility of the coherence of discourse, or the capacity for language to communicate. "Deconstruction," Semiotic theory (a study of signs with close connections to "Structuralism," "Reader response theory" in America ("Reception theory" in Europe), and "Gender theory" informed by the psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva are areas of inquiry that can be located under the banner of "Poststructuralism." If signifier and signified are both cultural concepts, as they are in "Poststructuralism," reference to an empirically certifiable reality is no longer guaranteed by language. "Deconstruction" argues that this loss of reference causes an endless deferral of meaning, a system of differences between units of language that has no resting place or final signifier that would enable the other signifiers to hold their meaning. The most important theorist of "Deconstruction," Jacques Derrida, has asserted, "There is no getting outside text," indicating a kind of free play of signification in which no fixed, stable meaning is possible. "Poststructuralism" in America was originally identified with a group of Yale academics, the Yale School of "Deconstruction:" J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann, and Paul de Man. Other tendencies in the moment after "Deconstruction" that share some of the intellectual tendencies of "Poststructuralism" would included the "Reader response" theories of Stanley Fish, Jane Tompkins, and Wolfgang Iser.

Lacanian psychoanalysis, an updating of the work of Sigmund Freud, extends "Postructuralism" to the human subject with further consequences for literary theory. According to Lacan, the fixed, stable self is a Romantic fiction; like the text in "Deconstruction," the self is a decentered mass of traces left by our encounter with signs, visual symbols, language, etc. For Lacan, the self is constituted by language, a language that is never one's own, always another's, always already in use. Barthes applies these currents of thought in his famous declaration of the "death" of the Author: "writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin" while also applying a similar "Poststructuralist" view to the Reader: "the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted."

Michel Foucault is another philosopher, like Barthes, whose ideas inform much of poststructuralist literary theory. Foucault played a critical role in the development of the postmodern perspective that knowledge is constructed in concrete historical situations in the form of discourse; knowledge is not communicated by discourse but is discourse itself, can only be encountered textually. Following Nietzsche, Foucault performs what he calls "genealogies," attempts at deconstructing the unacknowledged operation of power and knowledge to reveal the ideologies that make domination of one group by another seem "natural." Foucaldian investigations of discourse and power were to provide much of the intellectual impetus for a new way of looking at history and doing textual studies that came to be known as the "New Historicism."

6. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

"New Historicism," a term coined by Stephen Greenblatt, designates a body of theoretical and interpretive practices that began largely with the study of early modern literature in the United States. "New Historicism" in America had been somewhat anticipated by the theorists of "Cultural Materialism" in Britain, which, in the words of their leading advocate, Raymond Williams describes "the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production." Both "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism" seek to understand literary texts historically and reject the formalizing influence of previous literary studies, including "New Criticism," "Structuralism" and "Deconstruction," all of which in varying ways privilege the literary text and place only secondary emphasis on historical and social context. According to "New Historicism," the circulation of literary and non-literary texts produces relations of social power within a culture. New Historicist thought differs from traditional historicism in literary studies in several crucial ways. Rejecting traditional historicism's premise of neutral inquiry, "New Historicism" accepts the necessity of making historical value judgments. According to "New Historicism," we can only know the textual history of the past because it is "embedded," a key term, in the textuality of the present and its concerns. Text and context are less clearly distinct in New Historicist practice. Traditional separations of literary and non-literary texts, "great" literature and popular literature, are also fundamentally challenged. For the "New Historicist," all acts of expression are embedded in the material conditions of a culture. Texts are examined with an eye for how they reveal the economic and social realities, especially as they produce ideology and represent power or subversion. Like much of the emergent European social history of the 1980s, "New Historicism" takes particular interest in representations of marginal/marginalized groups and non-normative behaviors-witchcraft, cross-dressing, peasant revolts, and exorcisms-as exemplary of the need for power to represent subversive alternatives, the Other, to legitimize itself.

Louis Montrose, another major innovator and exponent of "New Historicism," describes a fundamental axiom of the movement as an intellectual belief in "the textuality of history and the historicity of texts." "New Historicism" draws on the work of Levi-Strauss, in particular his notion of culture as a "self-regulating system." The Foucaldian premise that power is ubiquitous and cannot be equated with state or economic power and Gramsci's conception of "hegemony," i.e., that domination is often achieved through culturally-orchestrated consent rather than force, are critical underpinnings to the "New Historicist" perspective. The translation of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on carnival coincided with the rise of the "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism" and left a legacy in work of other theorists of influence like Peter Stallybrass and Jonathan Dollimore. In its period of ascendancy during the 1980s, "New Historicism" drew criticism from the political left for its depiction of counter-cultural expression as always co-opted by the dominant discourses. Equally, "New Historicism's" lack of emphasis on "literariness" and formal literary concerns brought disdain from traditional literary scholars. However, "New Historicism" continues to exercise a major influence in the humanities and in the extended conception of literary studies.

7. Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism

"Ethnic Studies," sometimes referred to as "Minority Studies," has an obvious historical relationship with "Postcolonial Criticism" in that Euro-American imperialism and colonization in the last four centuries, whether external (empire) or internal (slavery) has been directed at recognizable ethnic groups: African and African-American, Chinese, the subaltern peoples of India, Irish, Latino, Native American, and Philipino, among others. "Ethnic Studies" concerns itself generally with art and literature produced by identifiable ethnic groups either marginalized or in a subordinate position to a dominant culture. "Postcolonial Criticism" investigates the relationships between colonizers and colonized in the period post-colonization. Though the two fields are increasingly finding points of intersection-the work of bell hooks, for example-and are both activist intellectual enterprises, "Ethnic Studies and "Postcolonial Criticism" have significant differences in their history and ideas.

"Ethnic Studies" has had a considerable impact on literary studies in the United States and Britain. In W.E.B. Dubois, we find an early attempt to theorize the position of African-Americans within dominant white culture through his concept of "double consciousness," a dual identity including both "American" and "Negro." Dubois and theorists after him seek an understanding of how that double experience both creates identity and reveals itself in culture. Afro-Caribbean and African writers-Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe-have made significant early contributions to the theory and practice of ethnic criticism that explores the traditions, sometimes suppressed or underground, of ethnic literary activity while providing a critique of representations of ethnic identity as found within the majority culture. Ethnic and minority literary theory emphasizes the relationship of cultural identity to individual identity in historical circumstances of overt racial oppression. More recently, scholars and writers such as Henry Louis Gates, Toni Morrison, and Kwame Anthony Appiah have brought attention to the problems inherent in applying theoretical models derived from Euro-centric paradigms (that is, structures of thought) to minority works of literature while at the same time exploring new interpretive strategies for understanding the vernacular (common speech) traditions of racial groups that have been historically marginalized by dominant cultures.

Though not the first writer to explore the historical condition of postcolonialism, the Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said's book Orientalism is generally regarded as having inaugurated the field of explicitly "Postcolonial Criticism" in the West. Said argues that the concept of "the Orient" was produced by the "imaginative geography" of Western scholarship and has been instrumental in the colonization and domination of non-Western societies. "Postcolonial" theory reverses the historical center/margin direction of cultural inquiry: critiques of the metropolis and capital now emanate from the former colonies. Moreover, theorists like Homi K. Bhabha have questioned the binary thought that produces the dichotomies-center/margin, white/black, and colonizer/colonized-by which colonial practices are justified. The work of Gayatri C. Spivak has focused attention on the question of who speaks for the colonial "Other" and the relation of the ownership of discourse and representation to the development of the postcolonial subjectivity. Like feminist and ethnic theory, "Postcolonial Criticism" pursues not merely the inclusion of the marginalized literature of colonial peoples into the dominant canon and discourse. "Postcolonial Criticism" offers a fundamental critique of the ideology of colonial domination and at the same time seeks to undo the "imaginative geography" of Orientalist thought that produced conceptual as well as economic divides between West and East, civilized and uncivilized, First and Third Worlds. In this respect, "Postcolonial Criticism" is activist and adversarial in its basic aims. Postcolonial theory has brought fresh perspectives to the role of colonial peoples-their wealth, labor, and culture-in the development of modern European nation states. While "Postcolonial Criticism" emerged in the historical moment following the collapse of the modern colonial empires, the increasing globalization of culture, including the neo-colonialism of multinational capitalism, suggests a continued relevance for this field of inquiry.

8. Gender Studies and Queer Theory

Gender theory came to the forefront of the theoretical scene first as feminist theory but has subsequently come to include the investigation of all gender and sexual categories and identities. Feminist gender theory followed slightly behind the reemergence of political feminism in the United States and Western Europe during the 1960s. Political feminism of the so-called "second wave" had as its emphasis practical concerns with the rights of women in contemporary societies, women's identity, and the representation of women in media and culture. These causes converged with early literary feminist practice, characterized by Elaine Showalter as "gynocriticism," which emphasized the study and canonical inclusion of works by female authors as well as the depiction of women in male-authored canonical texts.

Feminist gender theory is postmodern in that it challenges the paradigms and intellectual premises of western thought, but also takes an activist stance by proposing frequent interventions and alternative epistemological positions meant to change the social order. In the context of postmodernism, gender theorists, led by the work of Judith Butler, initially viewed the category of "gender" as a human construct enacted by a vast repetition of social performance. The biological distinction between man and woman eventually came under the same scrutiny by theorists who reached a similar conclusion: the sexual categories are products of culture and as such help create social reality rather than simply reflect it. Gender theory achieved a wide readership and acquired much its initial theoretical rigor through the work of a group of French feminist theorists that included Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, who while Bulgarian rather than French, made her mark writing in French. French feminist thought is based on the assumption that the Western philosophical tradition represses the experience of women in the structure of its ideas. As an important consequence of this systematic intellectual repression and exclusion, women's lives and bodies in historical societies are subject to repression as well. In the creative/critical work of Cixous, we find the history of Western thought depicted as binary oppositions: "speech/writing; Nature/Art, Nature/History, Nature/Mind, Passion/Action." For Cixous, and for Irigaray as well, these binaries are less a function of any objective reality they describe than the male-dominated discourse of the Western tradition that produced them. Their work beyond the descriptive stage becomes an intervention in the history of theoretical discourse, an attempt to alter the existing categories and systems of thought that found Western rationality. French feminism, and perhaps all feminism after Beauvoir, has been in conversation with the psychoanalytic revision of Freud in the work of Jacques Lacan. Kristeva's work draws heavily on Lacan. Two concepts from Kristeva-the "semiotic" and "abjection"-have had a significant influence on literary theory. Kristeva's "semiotic" refers to the gaps, silences, spaces, and bodily presence within the language/symbol system of a culture in which there might be a space for a women's language, different in kind as it would be from male-dominated discourse.

Masculine gender theory as a separate enterprise has focused largely on social, literary, and historical accounts of the construction of male gender identities. Such work generally lacks feminisms' activist stance and tends to serve primarily as an indictment rather than a validation of male gender practices and masculinity. The so-called "Men's Movement," inspired by the work of Robert Bly among others, was more practical than theoretical and has had only limited impact on gender discourse. The impetus for the "Men's Movement" came largely as a response to the critique of masculinity and male domination that runs throughout feminism and the upheaval of the 1960s, a period of crisis in American social ideology that has required a reconsideration of gender roles. Having long served as the de facto "subject" of Western thought, male identity and masculine gender theory awaits serious investigation as a particular, and no longer universally representative, field of inquiry.

Much of what theoretical energy of masculine gender theory currently possesses comes from its ambiguous relationship with the field of "Queer theory." "Queer theory" is not synonymous with gender theory, nor even with the overlapping fields of gay and lesbian studies, but does share many of their concerns with normative definitions of man, woman, and sexuality. "Queer theory" questions the fixed categories of sexual identity and the cognitive paradigms generated by normative (that is, what is considered "normal") sexual ideology. To "queer" becomes an act by which stable boundaries of sexual identity are transgressed, reversed, mimicked, or otherwise critiqued. "Queering" can be enacted on behalf of all non-normative sexualities and identities as well, all that is considered by the dominant paradigms of culture to be alien, strange, unfamiliar, transgressive, odd-in short, queer. Michel Foucault's work on sexuality anticipates and informs the Queer theoretical movement in a role similar to the way his writing on power and discourse prepared the ground for "New Historicism." Judith Butler contends that heterosexual identity long held to be a normative ground of sexuality is actually produced by the suppression of homoerotic possibility. Eve Sedgwick is another pioneering theorist of "Queer theory," and like Butler, Sedgwick maintains that the dominance of heterosexual culture conceals the extensive presence of homosocial relations. For Sedgwick, the standard histories of western societies are presented in exclusively in terms of heterosexual identity: "Inheritance, Marriage, Dynasty, Family, Domesticity, Population," and thus conceiving of homosexual identity within this framework is already problematic.

9. Cultural Studies

Much of the intellectual legacy of "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism" can now be felt in the "Cultural Studies" movement in departments of literature, a movement not identifiable in terms of a single theoretical school, but one that embraces a wide array of perspectives-media studies, social criticism, anthropology, and literary theory-as they apply to the general study of culture. "Cultural Studies" arose quite self-consciously in the 80s to provide a means of analysis of the rapidly expanding global culture industry that includes entertainment, advertising, publishing, television, film, computers and the Internet. "Cultural Studies" brings scrutiny not only to these varied categories of culture, and not only to the decreasing margins of difference between these realms of expression, but just as importantly to the politics and ideology that make contemporary culture possible. "Cultural Studies" became notorious in the 90s for its emphasis on pop music icons and music video in place of canonical literature, and extends the ideas of the Frankfurt School on the transition from a truly popular culture to mass culture in late capitalist societies, emphasizing the significance of the patterns of consumption of cultural artifacts. "Cultural Studies" has been interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary, from its inception; indeed, "Cultural Studies" can be understood as a set of sometimes conflicting methods and approaches applied to a questioning of current cultural categories. Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris, Tony Bennett and Simon During are some of the important advocates of a "Cultural Studies" that seeks to displace the traditional model of literary studies.

10. References and Further Reading

a. General Works on Theory

Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

During, Simon. Ed. The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1999.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Stanton, Gareth, and Maley, Willy. Eds. Postcolonial Criticism. New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 1997.

Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia. Eds. Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. 4th edition.

Richter, David H. Ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 2nd Ed. Bedford Books: Boston, 1998.

Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998.

b. Literary and Cultural Theory

Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Ed. J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 2001.

Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy: And Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans.

Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Tr. H.M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1953.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1988.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, 1947.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976.

Dubois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903.

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1981.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973.

Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

hooks, bell. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981.

Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. London: Routledge, 2001.

Lemon Lee T. and Reis, Marion J. Eds. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.

Lukacs, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1962.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1969.

Plato. The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961.

Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Vintage, 1982.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men. Between Men: English literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky Epistemology of the Closet. London: Penguin, 1994.

Showalter, Elaine. Ed. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. London: Virago, 1986.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: the Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Wellek, Rene and Warren, Austin. Theory of Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Author Information

Vince Brewton
Email: vbrewton@unanov.una.edu
University of North Alabama
U. S. A.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Literary theory" is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean.

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Basic theory for A Level (English Year 12 equivalent).

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Basic theory for A Level (English Year 12 equivalent).

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This component is designed to allow students to read widely, to choose their own texts (if appropriate) and to understand that contemporary study of literature needs to be informed by the fact that different theoretical and critical methods can be applied to the subject.

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Sigmund Freud biography, work, theory, self-analysis, dream interpretation, psychoanalysis, bibliography, quotes, references, resources

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Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men, and that their oppression is in some way illegitimate or unjustified. Under the umbrella of this general characterization there are, however, many interpretations of women and their oppression, so that it is a mistake to think of feminism as a single philosophical doctrine, or as implying an agreed political program.

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Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature: An Overview