Literary Criticism and Theory

From Plato to Postcolonialism

Pelagia Goulimari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415544313
• eBook ISBN: 9781135053017
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This incredibly useful volume offers an introduction to the history of literary criticism and theory from ancient Greece to the present. Grounded in the close reading of landmark theoretical texts, while seeking to encourage the reader's critical response, Pelagia Goulimari examines:

• major thinkers and critics from Plato and Aristotle to Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Said and Butler;
• key concepts, themes and schools in the history of literary theory: mimesis, inspiration, reason and emotion, the self, the relation of literature to history, society, culture and ethics, feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, queer theory;
• genres and movements in literary history: epic, tragedy, comedy, the novel; Romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism.

Historical connections between theorists and theories are traced and the book is generously cross-referenced. With useful features such as key-point conclusions, further reading sections, descriptive text boxes, detailed headings, and with a comprehensive index, this book is the ideal introduction to anyone approaching literary theory for the first time or unfamiliar with the scope of its history.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Mimēsis Plato and the poet
• 2 Aristotle and tragedy From Poetics to postcolonial tragedy
• 3 Medieval and Renaissance criticism From mimesis to creation
• 4 The Enlightenment and Romanticism Reason and imagination
• 5 Modernity, multiplicity and becoming
• 6 Freud and psychoanalytic criticism The self in fragments
• 7 Defamiliarization, alienation, dialogism and montage
• 8 Decentering modernisms Newness, tradition, culture and society
• 9 Twentieth-century North American criticism Close reading to interpretation, modernism to postmodernism, History to histories
• 10 Poetry and hermeneutics, critique and dissonant composition, freedom and situation
• 11 From structuralism to poststructuralism Text, power, minor literature, deconstruction
• 12 Poststructuralist deviations Mimicry, resignification, contrapuntal reading, the subaltern, Signifyin(g), hybridity
• Bibliography
• Index