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.

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.

From Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie, from Yeats to media coverage of the Gulf War, this title provides an account of the roots of imperialism in European culture.

Addresses developments in literary studies, including 'the growth of a kind of anti-theory', and the idea that literary theory has been institutionalized.

Four Essays.