Unsurpassed as a text for upper-division and beginning graduate students, Raman Selden's classic text is the liveliest, most readable and most reliable guide to contemporary literary theory. Includes applications of theory, cross-referenced to Selden's companion volume, Practicing Theory and Reading Literature.

Every art…needs its own critical organisation, and poetics will form a part of aesthetics as soon as aesthetics becomes the unified criticism of all of the arts instead of whatever it is now.1.