Includes bibliographical references (p. 777-790) and index.

Ancient Greek criticism. Classical literary criticism : intellectual and political backgrounds. Plato (428-ca. 347 BC) ; Aristotle (384-322 BC) -- Traditions of rhetoric. Greek rhetoric : Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon, Lysias, Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle ; Hellenistic period and Roman rhetoric : Rhetorica, Cicero, Quintilian -- Greek and Latin criticism during the Roman Empire. Horace (65-8 BC) ; Longinus (First century AD) ; Neo-Platonism : Plotinus, Macrobius, Boethius -- Medieval era : Early Middle Ages : St. Augustine ; Later Middle Ages : Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey de Vinsauf, Ibn Rushd (Averro�es), St. Thomas Aquinas ; Transitions : medieval humanism : Giovanni Boccaccio, Christine de Pisan -- Early modern period to the enlightenment. Early modern period : Giambattista Giraldi, Lodovico Castelvetro, Giacopo Mazzoni, Torquato Tasso, Joachim Du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, Sir Philip Sidney, George Gascoigne, George Puttenham -- Neoclassical literary criticism : Pierre Corneille, Nicolas Boileau, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Aphra Behn, Samuel Johnson ; Enlightenment : John Locke, Joseph Addison, Giambattista Vico, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft -- Earlier nineteenth century and Romanticism. Introduction to the modern period. Kantian system and Kant's aesthetics ; G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) ; Romanticism (I) : Germany and France : Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Germaine de Sta�el ; Romanticism (II) : England and America : William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe.

Later nineteenth century. Realism and naturalism : George Eliot, �Emile Zola, William Dean Howells, Henry James ; Symbolism and aestheticism : Charles Baudelaire, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde ; Heterological thinkers : Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Matthew Arnold ; Marxism : Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Gy�orgy Luk�acs, Terry Eagleton -- Twentieth century. Twentieth century : backgrounds and perspectives. Psychoanalytic criticism : Freud and Lacan ; Formalisms : Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, John Crowe Ransom, William K. Wimsatt, Monroe C. Beardsley, T.S. Eliot ; Structuralism : Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes ; Deconstruction : Jacques Derrida ; Feminist criticism : Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Showalter, Mich�ele Barrett, Julia Kristeva, H�el�ene Cixous ; Reader-response and reception theory : Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish ; Postcolonial criticism : Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ; New historicism : Stephen Greenblatt, Michel Foucault.