The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 8, From Formalism to Poststructuralism

This volume covers the most influential and controversial areas of literary theory in their Continental and Anglo-American contexts.

Volume 8 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism deals with the most influential and hotly debated areas of literary theory as they developed in Europe and revolutionised Anglo-American literary studies. Incorporating full bibliographies, this volume charts and analyses these cross-cultural intellectual movements.Volume 8 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism deals with the most influential and hotly debated areas of literary theory: those developing in Europe but having their main impact in the Anglo-American world of academic literary studies, whose course they have fundamentally redirected. The structuralism, poststructuralism, Russian formalism, semiotics, narratology, hermeneutics, phenomenology, reception theory, and speech act theory associated with European writers including Barthes, Todorov, Derrida, and Iser, are here described in the context of their original development, but with an eye also to their eventual influence; and the volume includes a reflective chapter by Richard Rorty on deconstruction. Incorporating full bibliographies, this volume engages systematically with the history of the twentieth century's most profound and extensive set of cross-cultural intellectual movements.