Defines our understanding of colonialism and empire.

What is Literary Theory? Is there a relationship between literature and culture? Addressing such questions, this book offers insights into theories about the nature of language and meaning, and outlines the ideas behind a number of different schools: deconstruction, semiotics, postcolonial theory, and structuralism amongst them.

This text contains two of Walter Benjamin's essays, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , and Theses on the Philosophy of History , as well as others on the art of translation, Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust, and book collecting.

Here, one of France's greatest intellectuals explores the evolving social, economic and political forces that have shaped our attitudes to sex. Foucault describes how we are in the process of making a science of sex which is devoted to the analysis of desire rather than the increase of pleasure.

Unravels the many different definitions of ideology, explores the history of the concept from the Enlightenment to postmodernism, and interprets the works of major philosophers.

Dealing with literary criticism, the author aims to show how, from antiquity to the twentieth century, literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. The exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature.