Concise Companion to Literary Theory

I have encouraged the editor to make this volume more American in its emphasis as at the moment the content has a rather a British bias. He agrees with this sentiment and, to this end, he is planning on inviting a greater proportion of US contributors than is listed here. He will also be addressing the content to ensure that the book is suitable for use in the UK and the US, as suggested in the comments from US readers ?EKB A Concise Companion to Literary Theory Since 1995 ed. Peter Barry, University of Wales, Aberystwyth This book examines the developments in literary theory which have taken place since the mid 1990s. Its primary readership is envisaged as MA and PhD students (and their tutors) who took (or have taught) a standard theory course at undergraduate level covering all the usual topics ? structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, postcolonialism, and so on. They now wish to update their ?take? on theory, going beyond this mainly 1980s paradigm, and taking into account the shift in intellectual climate which has characterized the ?post theory? era we have now entered. While it will also be extremely useful to students taking third year or English Major undergraduate theory courses, the book aims to build upon the contents of these foundation courses, offering a clearly?defined extension of them, and seeking to meet the additional needs of postgraduate students. The era of post?theory (or perhaps ?posthumous theory?) respresented in the collection seems to have a number of pervasive characteristics: it is less willing than hitherto to suspend disbelief in the face of vast, but uncorroborated, intellectual claims, and more committed to engaging with material at an empirical level, so that findings are demonstrated, rather than just magisterially asserted. Clarity is now expected, even of literary theorists, and the poetic licences issued in the 1970s and 80s have been revoked. Whereas before, theorists were explorers and speculators, just passing through the newfound lands discovered beyond the traditional horizons of the discipline, now they are settlers, staking out specific new fields of enquiry and beginning to develop them in a systematic way. The current ?afterlives? of theory, then, are characterized by (as we might call it) a strategic ?downsizing? of the old intellectual ?mega?zones?: thus, structuralism has been eclipsed by narratology, originally one of its own specialist sub?sets: the undifferentiated concepts of ?history? and ?politics?, which were the subject of Marxist?materialist theory, have been replaced by minute attention to the cultural logistics of specific periods ? especially early modernism, Romanticism, and Victorianism: the body, the uncanny, and the environment have become the precise theoretical foci for energies which a decade ago would have been devoted to deconstruction and poststructuralism ? intellectual attitudes or processes which claimed a universal applicability, and had no designated sphere of operations other than the totalities of ?western metaphysics? or ?language?. This book, then, represents theory after ?Theory?, seeking to define the character of its new post?1990s paradigm. Without slavishly following a laid?down protocol, each chapter will incorporate an overview or summary of the pre?1990s paradigm for its topic, a lively and succinct account of key recent developments, and a section which shows these new developments at work on specific literary or cultural topics.