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.

Explores the place of the literary in theory. This account of the fortunes of the literary in theory, of the resistance to theory, and of key theoretical concepts - text, sign, interpretation, performative, and omniscience - provides insight into various theoretical debates.

Roland Barthes was the leading figure of French Structuralism, the theoretical movement of the 1960s which revolutionized the study of literature and culture, as well as history and psychoanalysis. But Barthes was a man who disliked orthodoxies. This book surveys Barthes' work in prose.

Here this immensely influential 20 year old title is reissued due to its continuing relevance as a tool in understanding the literary movement that has dominated recent Anglo-American literary criticism.

A classic survey of structuralist literary criticism combined with a discussion about how English and American criticism might benefit from its lessons.

This book brings together some of the most distinguished figures currently at work in philosophy, literary theory and criticism to debate the limits of interpretation.

Combines an acute survey of structuralist literary criticism with an argument about how English and American criticism might benefit from its lessons.

Here this immensely influential twenty year old title is reissued due to its continuing relevance as a tool in understanding the literary movement that has dominated recent Anglo-American literary criticism.