This is an authoritative and accessible guide to modern ideas in the broad interdisciplinary fields of cultural and critical theory that have developed from interactions among different modern traditions of thought. All strands of theory are represented in a volume that reflects the remarkable dissolution during the past 20 years of many of the traditional boundaries separating disciplines of study. Work in these fields that appeared before the twentieth century is included when it forms an important context for understanding later thinking. A special feature of the dictionary is the inclusion of a number of speculative or polemical essays on selected key topics or authors.Entries include movements such as deconstruction, the work of individual theorists such as Louis Althusser, Karl Marx, Raymond Williams, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva and Virginia Woolf, and also important concepts. Invaluable to students and scholars in such disciplines as literature, film studies, cultural studies, philosophy, history, theology, linguistics, politics, law, urban studies, psychoanalysis, and women's studies. It is supported by an analytic index and a comprehensive bibliography.