Literary Criticism and Theory From Plato to Postcolonialism

This incredibly useful volume offers an introduction to the history of literary criticism and theory from ancient Greece to the present. Grounded in the close reading of landmark theoretical texts, while seeking to encourage the reader's critical response, Pelagia Goulimari examines:

• major thinkers and critics from Plato and Aristotle to Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Said and Butler;
• key concepts, themes and schools in the history of literary theory: mimesis, inspiration, reason and emotion, the self, the relation of literature to history, society, culture and ethics, feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, queer theory;
• genres and movements in literary history: epic, tragedy, comedy, the novel; Romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism.

Historical connections between theorists and theories are traced and the book is generously cross-referenced. With useful features such as key-point conclusions, further reading sections, descriptive text boxes, detailed headings, and with a comprehensive index, this book is the ideal introduction to anyone approaching literary theory for the first time or unfamiliar with the scope of its history.

Introduction 1. Mimēsis: Plato and the poet 2. Aristotle and tragedy: from Poetics to postcolonial tragedy 3. Medieval and Renaissance criticism: from mimesis to creation 4. The Enlightenment and Romanticism: reason and imagination 5. Modernity, multiplicity and becoming 6. Freud and psychoanalytic criticism: the self in fragments 7. Defamiliarization, alienation, dialogism and montage 8. Decentering modernisms: newness, tradition, culture and society 9. Twentieth-Century North American criticism: close reading to interpretation, modernism to postmodernism, History to histories 10. Poetry & hermeneutics, critique & dissonant composition, freedom & situation 11. From structuralism to poststructuralism: text, power, minor literature, deconstruction 12. Poststructuralist deviations: mimicry, resignification, contrapuntal reading, the subaltern, Signifyin(g), hybridity. Index

Pelagia Goulimari is a member of the English Faculty of the University of Oxford, where she lectures on literary theory, and a former convenor of Oxford’s graduate programme in Women’s Studies. She is general editor of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Her publications include Postmodernism: What Moment? (2007) and Toni Morrison (2009).