Literary Theory

By David Carter

It sounds daunting: all those '-isms', long technical words, weird French thinkers and incomprehensible Germans. You can't read a book nowadays, it seems, without being required to refer to them. From university students to the average intelligent reader, everyone is expected to justify their 'theoretical perspective'. The problem is that defining what you mean by 'theory', let alone what you mean by 'literary', causes most people, including the theorists themselves, to mumble incoherently and shuffle their feet. And it is not as though there were just one coherent body of theory to master: there are Formalist, Structuralist, Marxist and Psychoanalytical theories; Poststructuralist, Postcolonialist, and Postmodernist theories; not to mention Feminist and Queer Theories, and even Anti-Theories!
Most books providing introductions to Literary Theory are long-winded tomes, guiding dogged readers through the twists and turns of critical analysis and logic. This small volume goes to the heart of the key concepts of Literary Theory, explaining them in clear everyday language. It provides witty and memorable comments and quotations, and enables the student of literature to raise the most pertinent and challenging questions, which even university professors have difficulty answering.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pocket Essentials
• Release date: Feb 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781842438138

David Carter

David Carter (1952-2020) had a varied career as a writer, editor, and filmmaker. He is best known as the author of Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, considered to be the authoritative book on the subject. He is also the author of biographies of Salvador Dali and George Santayana, he edited and compiled Spontaneous Mind, a collection of interviews with Allen Ginsberg, and directed the film Meher Baba in Italy for Peter Townshend. Carter has a B.A. from Emory University and an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin. He lived in Greenwich Village in New York City.

Reviews for Literary Theory

[duck2ducks · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Dry as hell, but what do you expect from a 'Pocket Essentials' guide? Lit Crit is something I've no experience with, and want to spend some time learning about, so I figured a broad overview might not be the worst place to start. Now that I have, I know which parts I find interesting and which parts seem really dull, or beside the point, or just outside my own realm of interest. But it's a short enough book that it was fine for what it was.