Modern Literary Criticism and Theory A History [Hardcover]

Written in concise and clear language, this book offers an historical overview of literary criticism and theory throughout the twentieth century along with a close analysis of some of the most important and commonly taught texts from the period.

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• Provides an accessible introduction to modern literary theory and criticism
  
• Places various modes of criticism within their historical and intellectual contexts
  
• Offers close readings of some of the major critical texts of the period
  
• Explores the works of a diverse group of 20th-century writers, including Babbitt, Woolf, Bakhtin, Heidegger, Lacan, Derrida, Judith Butler, Zizek, Nussbaum, Negri and Hardt
  
• Covers formalism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, reader-response criticism, historicism, gender studies, cultural studies, and film theory

Acknowledgments.

Introduction:.

Formative Moments in the History of Literary Criticism.

Historical Backgrounds of Modern Criticism and Theory.

The Scope of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism.

1. The First Decades: From Liberal Humanism to Formalism.

The New Humanists, Neo-Romantics, and Precursors of Formalism.

The Background of Modernism.

The Poetics of Modernism: W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot.

Formalism:.

Russian Formalism:.

Boris Eichenbaum (1886–1959).

Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975).

Roman Jakobson (1896–1982).

The New Criticism:.

John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974).