Beginning theory has been helping students navigate through the thickets of literary and cultural theory for well over a decade. This volume focuses on literary theory. It offers students and readers introduction to the field.

Foucault shows the development of the Western system of prisons, police organizations, administrative and legal hierarchies for social control - and the growth of disciplinary society as a whole.

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.

Defines our understanding of colonialism and empire.

Understanding Media: the most important book ever written on communication. Ignore its message at your peril.

Describes that cultural theory must start thinking ambitiously - not so that it can hand the West its legitimation, but so that it can seek to make sense of the grand narratives in which it is embroiled.

Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, this book questions the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. It considers gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.

Homi Bhabha is one of that small group occupying the front ranks of cultural theoretical thought. Any serious discussion of post-colonial/postmodern scholarship is inconceivable without referencing Mr. Bhabha. - Toni Morrison

Focusing on the arcades of 19th-century Paris, the glass-roofed rows of shops, Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in 36 categories with descriptive rubrics such as Fashion , Boredom or Prostitution .

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.

A survey of over 350 of the key terms central to cultural theory, this edition includes entries on colonialism, cyberculture, globalisation, terrorism and visual studies.

What exactly is postmodernism? This graphic guide explains the maddeningly enigmatic concept that has been used to define the world's cultural condition.

Presenting introduction to several important texts in post-colonial theory and criticism, this second edition includes 121 extracts from key works in the field. Covering more debates, topics and critics, it is the starting point for students, and issues a potent challenge to the ways in which we think and write about literature and culture.

Develops the theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most "material" dimensions of sex and sexuality. This work offers a reformulation of the materiality of bodies, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. It argues that power operates to constrain "sex" from the start.

Develops a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure. This book represents an effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body.

This volume is concerned with the UK's postwar, music-centred, white working-class subcultures, from teddy boys to mods and rockers to skinheads to punks.

A series of essays in which Barthes seeks to tear away masks and demystify the signs, signals, gestures and messages through which western society sustains, sells, identifies and yet obscures itself.

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.

A classic of twentieth century thought, this work is Adorno's literary and philosophical masterpiece.

In this classic account of madness, Michel Foucault shows once and for all why he is one of the most distinguished European philosophers since the end of World War II.