Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Literary Theory in Classical Times
Rhetorical Criticisam
Plato
Aristotle
Horace
Longinus
2 Literary Theory in the Middle Ages
Allegorical Exegesis
3 The Rise and Fall of Neoclassicism
The Question of Language
The Idealising Strain
The Italian Aristotelians
Neoclassicism and the Purification of language
French Neoclassical Theory
The British Version of Neoclassicism
British Theory in the Age of Sensibility
Vico,Diderot,Lessing
4 Romantic Literary Theory
Herder and the Spirit of the Time
The Influence of Kant
The Organic Principle
The Role of the Critic
Some British Themes
5 Social Theories of the 19th Century
Belinsky and the Three Radicals
Matthew Arnold
the Beginnings of Sociological Criticism:Taine and Marx
6 Naturalism, Symbolism and Modernism
French Naturalists
French Symbolists
……
7 New Developments in Theory
8 20th-Century Russian Theory
9 Anglo-American Criticism, 1900-60
10 Phenomenological Criticism in France and Germany
11 French Structuralism
Epilogue: Into the Postmodernist Period