A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory

Thoroughly updated and revised, the second edition of this highly successful Dictionary offers an authoritative and accessible guide to modern ideas in the broad interdisciplinary fields of cultural and critical theory. The new edition reflects recent developments in the field; original contributions have been fully revised and over 40 new entries have been added. The bibliography – a major resource for the study of cultural and critical theory, has been thoroughly updated, as have the suggestions for further reading at the end of each section. The Dictionary reflects the remarkable crossing of many of the traditional boundaries separating disciplines of study, with all major strands of theory represented.

Entries include theoretical movements, such as deconstruction; the work of individual theorists, such as Noam Chomsky, Raymond Williams, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva and Virginia Woolf; as well as important concepts, with a number of speculative or polemical essays. Lively in style and with a wide variety of content, this Dictionary is invaluable for students of literature, cultural studies, philosophy, and many related disciplines.

Michael Payne is Professor of English Emeritus at Bucknell University, USA. He is general editor for The Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory (with Harold Scheizer, 12 vols., 1990–1995); author of Reading Theory: An Introduction to Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva (1993) and Reading Knowledge:  An Introduction to Barthes, Foucault, and Althusser (1997); and editor of Renaissance Literature: An Anthology (with John Hunter, 2003), and The Greenblatt Reader (with Stephen Greenblatt, 2005) all published by Wiley-Blackwell.

Jessica Rae Barbera is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her areas of specialization include Cultural and Critical Theory, British Modernism, Psychoanalysis, Literatures of Medicine and Science, Illness Narratives, and Memoir. She is the recipient of the 2009−2010 Andrew Mellon Fellowship, and is currently at work on her dissertation, The Medicalization of Pain: The Human in the 20th Century.