Global Literary Theory: An Anthology

A collection of quite possibly every significant or celebrated essay and book chapter about popular theories, Richard Lane’s Global Literary Theory: An Anthology serves as a brilliant stepping stone for those readers out there who are fascinated by theories, theories as applied to literature, or just want to broaden their minds as to how they can interpret their understandings of literature. I have to admit that have not read the entire tome (seriously, the thing is huge), I have read a large portion of it for uni and trust a nerdy masochist such as myself to review books I’ve had to read for uni! But, if I don’t let people know about this book, how else will they? 

As the title hints, the book is a collection of essays and book chapters from heaps of different theorists in various fields: some rock star theorists such as Said, Freud, and Barthes, and some not so well known. The book contains seventy-nine chapters, each one the work from a specific theorist and each chapter begins with a little summary from Lane about what the central points of the forthcoming work are, outlining them in a way that then makes the essay or book chapter itself easier to grasp (because some of them can be quite dense: like Derrida for example). The entire anthology itself is actually pretty good because it really does make you think about applying some of these modes of interpretation to your own readings of texts, not just books but other essays, articles, and stuff. The main bulk of the book is divided into core collections: 

Part 1: Formalism and Structuralism; featuring works from Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, Francisco Vaz Da Silva, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva. 

Part 2: Deconstruction and Poststructuralism; featuring works from Pal Ahluwalia, Jacques Derrida, Mary Poovey, Tilottama Rajan, A. T. Nuyen, and Julia Kristeva. 

Part 3: Media, Culture and Postmodernism; featuring works from Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, Tricia Rose, Edward Said, Ravi Sundaram, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gerald Vizenor, Jean Baudrillard, and Ziauddin Sardar. 

Part 4: Psychoanalysis and Its Critics; featuring works from Sigmund Freud (of course), Jacques Lacan, Shoshana Felman, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, annd Slavoj Zizek. 

Part 5: Marxism, Critical Theory and New Historicism; featuring works from Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Fredric Jameson, Sue Vice, Walter Benjamin, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, and Daria Berg. 

Part 6: Race and Ethnicity; featuring works from Frantz Fanon, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paul Gilroy, George Elliott Clarke, Dara N. Byrne, Rebecca E. Karl, and Pamela Scully. 

Part 7: Postcolonial Studies; featuring works from Gautam Bhadra, Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Chinua Achebe, Gina Wisker, and Thomas King. 

Part 8: Gender and Queer Theory; featuring works from Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and K. L. Walters et. al. 

Part 9: Feminism; featuring works from Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan D. Gubar, Margaret Homans, Sonia Shah, Gwendolyn Mikell, and Miriam Cooke. 

Part 10: New Textualities; featuring works from Linda and Michael Hutcheon, Sherrill Grace, Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Rebecca Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer, Jacques Derrida, Hent Di Vries, Jens Zimmermann, Slavoj Zizek, Johanna Drucker, Raymond Siemens, and Liu Kang. 

Part 11: Globalization and Global Studies; featuring works from Suman Gupta, Timothy Brennan, Shaobo Xie, Akbar S. Ahmed and Hastings Donnan, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. 

Filled with more opinions, theories, questions, and knowledge than you can poke a stick at, Global Literary Theory is a great book for anyone who’s interested in how we make meaning from reading literature. And some of the theories are really interesting too!