Modern Criticism and Theory ─ A Reader

Greatly expanded by 25 new pieces or essays, this edition includes newly emergent concepts such as ecocriticsm and post-theory while also providing seminal works of criticism from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lodge (English literature emeritus, U. of Birmingham) and Wood (literature, Loughborough U.) provide four dozen pieces and essays ranging historically from The German Ideology by Marx and Engels to Black Skin, White Masks by Fanon to works by Said, Fish, Lyotard, Irigaray, Spivak and Weeks on up to After Theory by Eagleton. Themes include language, adaptation and translation; the postmodern; the subject and questions of agency; history and place; gender; the reader, the author and the text; and non- and post-theory. Authos include Saussure, Brecht, Barthes, Kristeva, Eco, Lacan, Derrida, de Man, Freud, Woolf, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Cixous, Sedgwick and Judith Butler. The result is remarkably well-balanced and representative and the introduction is excellent. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

David Lodge is Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at the Universityof Birmingham, where he taught from 1960 until 1987, when he became a full-time writer. He is well-known as a novelist, and has also written screenplays and stage plays.

Nigel Wood is Head of the Department of English and Drama, LoughboroughUniversityand is an expert on eighteenth-century literature and the staging of dramatic texts. He has edited a wide number of books and is also involved in occasional advisory work for the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company