This volume offers a comprehensive account of modern literary criticism, presenting the field as part of an ongoing historical and intellectual tradition. Featuring thirty-nine specially commissioned chapters from an international team of esteemed contributors, it fills a large gap in the market by combining the accessibility of single-authored selections with a wide range of critical perspectives. The volume is divided into four parts. Part One covers the key philosophical and aesthetic origins of literary theory, while Part Two discusses the foundational movements and thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century. Part Three offers introductory overviews of the most important movements and thinkers in modern literary theory, and Part Four looks at emergent trends and future directions.

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Patricia Waugh has published extensively in the field of modern fiction and criticism. She is the author of The Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Backgrounds (1995) and Revolutions of the Word: Intellectual Contexts for the Study of Modern Literature (1997). She has also edited a number of collections and anthologies of modern literary theory and postmodernism, most recently The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (with David Fuller).