1.What is 'Literary Theory?'
2.Humanist Literary Theory
Plato
Aristotle
Horace
Sir Philip Sidney
Sir Francis Bacon
Joseph Addison
Edmund Burke
Samuel Johnson
Sir Joshua Reynolds
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
John Keats
Edgar Allan Poe
Matthew Arnold
3.Structuralism
Ferdinand de Saussure
Claude Levi-Strauss and 'The Structural Study of Myth'
Interlude: Humanism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism
4.Deconstruction
Binary Opposition
The Role of the Center
Bricolage
5.Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud
Jacques Lacan
Interlude: 'Self' to 'Subject'
6.Feminism
'Pre-poststructuralist' Feminist Literary Theory
Poststructuralist Feminist Literary Theory
Helene Cixous and 'The Laugh of the Medusa'
Luce Irigaray and 'This Sex Which Is Not One'
7.Queer Theory
Flexible Sexuality?
Gay/Lesbian Studies
Interlude: History to Historicism
Humanist History
New Historicism
8.Ideology and Discourse
Marxist Theory: a Few Basics
Louis Althusser and Ideology
Mikhail Bakhtin and 'Discourse in the Novel'
Michel Foucault: Discourse, Power/Knowledge,and the Author Function
9.Race and Postcolonialism
Colonialism and 'English'
Henry Louis Gates, Jr and 'The Signifying Monkey'
Postcolonialism and Orientalism
Homi Bhaba and 'The Location of Culture'
Gloria Anzaldua and 'Borderlands/La Frontera'
10.Postmodernism
Modernity
Jean Baudrillard
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Coda: What Now?
Index