This anthology uses extracts from the works of the leading thinkers in the field of literary criticism to introduce the main ideas at the centre of today's literary and cultural debates. Each extract begins with an introduction that places the writing in context and ends with suggestions for further reading that will help students research the subject further.

1. Karl Marx "Preface" and section on "The Premisses of the Materialist Method" in The German Ideology 2. Ferdinand de Saussure "The Object of Study" 3. Sigmund Freud "The Premises and Technique of Interpretation" and "Manifest and Latent Elements" 4. Walter Benjamin "The Task of the Translator" 5. Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own 6. Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex, "Myth and Reality" and "Women's Situation and Character" 7. Frantz Fanon "The Negro and Language" 8. Roman Jakobson "Linguistics & Poetics" and "The Metaphoric & Metonymic Poles" 9. Berthold Brecht "Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare's Coriolanus" 10. Jacques Lacan "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious" 11. Jacques Derrida "Structure, Sign & Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" 12. Tzvetan Todorov "The Typology of Detective Form" 13. Mikhail Bakhtin "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" 14. E. D. Hirsch Jr. "Faulty Perspectives" - in current edition - and "In Defence of the Author" 15. Michel Foucault "What is an author?" 16. Wolfgang Iser "The Reading Process: a phenomenological approach" 17. Roland Barthes"The Death of the Author" and "Textual Analysis: Poe's 'Valdemar'" 18. Raymond Williams "The Country and the City" 19. Julia Kristeva "The Ethics of Linguistics" 20. Helene Cixous "Sorties" 21. Edward Said "Crisis" 22. Stanley Fish "Interpreting the Variorum" 23. J Hillis Miller "The Critic as Host" 24. Jean-Francois Lyotard"Answering the Question What is Postmodernism?" 25. Jean Baudrillard "Simulacra and Simulations" 26. Paul de Man "The Resistance to Theory" 27. Geoffrey Hartman "The Interpreter's Freud" 28. Umberto Eco "Casablanca: cult movies and intertextual collage" 29. Michael Rifaterre"Transposing Presuppositions on the Semiotics of Literary Translation" 30. Patrocinio P. Schweickart "Reading Ourselves: Toward a feminist theory of reading" 31. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick "The Beast in the Closet" 32. Luce Irigarary "The Bodily Encounter with the Mother" 33. Fredric Jameson"Postmodernism and Consumer Society" 34. Stephen Greenblatt "The Circulation of Social Energy" 35. Jerome McGann "The Textual Condition" 36. Stuart Hall"New Ethnicities" 37. Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak"Questions of Multi-culturalism" 38. Judith Butler"Critically Queer" 39. Malcolm Bowie"Freud and the European Unconscious" 40. Jeffrey Weeks"The Sphere of the Intimate and the Values of Everyday Life" 41. Lawrence Buell"Place" 42. Slavoj Zizek"Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach" 43. Meyda Yegenoglu"The battle of the veil: woman between Orientalism and nationalism" 44. David Scott Kastan"From codex to computer; or, presence of mind" 45. Alexander Stille"Writing and the Creation of the Past" 46. Valentine Cunningham"Touching Reading" 47. Jacqueline Rose"Daddy" 48. Terry Eagleton"The Rise and Fall of Theory"