This reader is designed as a companion volume and is some sense, sequel to David Lodge's 20th Century Literary Criticism-A Reader. Since the earlier book was compiled, the academic study of literature has been revolutionised by the impact of structuralism and post-structuralist theory. This book aims to provide, within the covers of a single book, a selection of important and representative work from all the major theorectical schools or tendencies in contemporaryr criticism, and to place them before the reader in two alternative orders - one historical, the other thematic. The twenty-eight authors represented are: Ferdinand de Saussure, Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Gerard Genette, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Wolfgang Iser, Julia Kristeva, Harold Bloom, E. D. Hirsch Jr, M. H. Abrams, J. Hillis Miller, Helene Cixous, Edward Said, Stanley Fish, Elaine Showalter, Paul De Man, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Catherine Belsey, Geoffrey Hartman, Juliet Mitchell, Colin MacCabe, Umberto Eco.