Literary Theory: A Complete Introduction

by Sara Upstone

Overview

Literary theory has now become integral to how we produce literary criticism. When critics write about a text, they no longer think just about the biographical or historical contexts of the work, but also about the different approaches that literary theory offers. By making use of these, they create new interpretations of the text that would not otherwise be possible. In your own reading and writing, literary theory fosters new avenues into the text. It allows you to make informed comments about the language and form of literature, but also about the core themes - concepts such as gender, sexuality, the self, race, and class - which a text might explore.

Literary theory gives you an almost limitless number of texts to work into your own response, ensuring that your interpretation is truly original. This is why, although literary theory can initially appear alienating and difficult, it is something to get really excited about. Imagine you are standing in the centre of a circular room, with a whole set of doors laid out around you. Each doorway opens on to a new and illuminating field of knowledge that can change how you think about what you have read: perhaps in just a small way, but also perhaps dramatically and irrevocably. You can open one door, or many of them. The choice is yours. Put the knowledge you gain together with your own interpretation, however, and you have a unique and potentially fascinating response.

Each chapter in Literary Theory: A Complete Introduction covers a key school of thought, progressing to a point at which you'll have a full understanding of the range of responses and approaches available for textual interpretation. As well as focusing on such core areas as Marxism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Structuralism and Poststructuralism, this introduction brings in recent developments such as Eco and Ethical Criticism and Humanisms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781473611924
Publisher:	Mobius
Publication date:	08/22/2017
Series:	Complete Introductions Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	957,607
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Sara Upstone is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University. She specializes in contemporary postcolonial, British and American literature. She is the author or editor of three books on culture and theory) and has been teaching in this area for over ten years. She is currently researching the relationship between literary genre and representations of race in contemporary fiction.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

How to use this book xv

1 Aestheticism 1

The Pre-Raphaelites

Art for art's sake

Symbolism

Decadence

New aestheticism

2 Formalism 15

Practical criticism

The new criticism

Continental formalism

Defamiliarization

Formalism today

3 Reader response theory 29

Is there a text on this paper?

Rejecting formalism

Unaccceptable readings?

'Readerly' and 'writerly'

Reader response theory today

4 Marxism and post-Marxism 41

Base and superstructrure

Ideologies

The Frankfurt School

Post-Marxism

5 Structuralism 55

The elements of language

The sign

'The Death of the Author'

Denotations and connotations

Metaphor and metonymy

Narratology

6 Psychoanalytic criticism 69

Identity and the self

Jungian psychoanalysis

Lacanian psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis and literature

7 Modernism and surrealism 83

High modernism

Surrealism

When was/is modernism?

8 Existentialism 97

Life and truth

Nietzsche's Übermensch

Authenticity and bad faith

Absurdism

9 Poststructuralism 109

Language and reality

Deconstruction

Poststructuralist politics?

The heterotopia Intertextuality

Gilies Deleuze

10 Postmodernism 123

Postmodern culture

The simalcrum

Postmodern politics

Postmodern literature

Historiographic metafiction

Post-postmodernism

11 Feminist theory 137

First-wave feminism

Second-wave feminism

The rise of feminist literary theory

French feminist theory

Feminisms

Third-wave feminism and beyond

12 Queer theory 151

Dancing to your own tune

Queer

Compulsory heterosexuality

Gender performativity

Undoing gender

Queering literature

13 Postcolonial criticism 167

The Empire writes back

Postcolonial spaces

Postcolonial forms

Criticism of postcolonial theory

14 Cultural studies 181

What is culture?

Critiquing mass culture

Interdisciplinarity

Cultural identities

15 Historicisms and materialisms 195

Historicisms

Cultural materialism

New materialism

Decentring the human

Ergodic literature

16 Humanisms 209

Being human

Humanist ethics

Humanism and literature

17 Ethical criticism 221

The ethical text and morality

The ethical turn

Three ethical moments

Transversal poetics

18 Genre theory 235

The influence of Aristotle

The Chicago School

The Rhetoric of Fiction

The role of the reader

'Popular' literatures

19 Ecocriticism 247

Studying the earth

The death of nature

Critiquing the human

Conclusion 259

References 261

Index 275

Answers 287