Literary Theory important Critical Writings timeline (UGC NET English Unit IX)

 

1795–1830 Major contributions to literary theory by Romantic writers

1860s Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin flourish as cultural and literary critics

1890–1940 Modernist era; important theoretical works by W. B. Yeats, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and others; flourishing of “little magazines”

1891 Oscar Wilde publishes Intentions, essays on literature and literary theory

1903 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

1914 Wyndham Lewis begins publishing Blast

1915–1930s Moscow Linguistic Circle and the Prague Linguistic Circle flourish

1916 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics

1918–1929 Bakhtin Circle, St. Petersburg

1920 Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel

1922 T. S. Eliot begins publishing Criterion

1923 Institute of Social Research, incorporated into University of Frankfurt

1924 Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction

I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism

1925 Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose

1927 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

1928 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale

1929 M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

1931 Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle

1932 F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis begin publishing Scrutiny

1939 Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition

1944 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment

1947 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

1948 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition

1949 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn

1951 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Refl ections from Damaged Life

1953 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero

1954 W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry

1955 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, co-directors of the Institute of Social Research

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization

1956 Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language

1957 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel

Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

1958 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology

1961 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

1963 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

1964 Founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham

1966 Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”

Symposium, “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” Johns Hopkins University Humanities Center

Wayne Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction

Jacques Lacan, Écrits

Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method

1966–72 Gérard Genette, Figures

1967 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology

1968 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

1969 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language

Vine Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins

1970 Kate Millet, Sexual Politics

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

1971 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight

Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature

1974 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman

1975 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body

1976 J. Hillis Miller, “Ariadne’s Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line”

Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing

Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory

1976–84 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

1977 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose

1978 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response

Edward Said, Orientalism

1979 Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

1980 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox

Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?

Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning

Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Thousand Plateaus:

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism

Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art

Jane Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism

1981 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (composed 1930s and ’40s)

Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays on the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading

Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity”

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

1982 J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition

Shoshana Felman, Literature and Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne

Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative

Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction

1983 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

Louis Montrose, “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form”

1984 bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

1985 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire

Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics

Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory

1986 Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797

1987 Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction

Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization

Molefi K. Asante, The Afrocentric Idea

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

1988 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism

1989 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology

1990 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference

1991 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

1992 Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political

Mary Joe Frug, Postmodern Legal Feminism

Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture

1993 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”

1994 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture

1995 Ann McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest

Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race

1996 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland

Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

1999 Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African American Experience

2000 Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature

Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left

Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture

2002 Arnold Krupat, Red Matters: Native American Studies

Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity

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