This is a list of important and seminal works in the field of critical theory.
Otto Maria Carpeaux História da Literatura Ocidental, 8 vol. (Portuguese, 1959–66) M. H. Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition Angela Davis Women, Race, and Class Are Prisons Obsolete? Theodor Adorno Aesthetic Theory Negative Dialectics Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment Louis Althusser For Marx Lenin and Philosophy Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature Mikhail Bakhtin Discourse in the Novel Rabelais and his World Roland Barthes Image, Music, Text Mythologies (book) Jean Baudrillard The Perfect Crime Simulation and Simulacra Walter Benjamin Illuminations The Origin of German Tragic Drama Homi K. Bhabha The Location of Culture Pierre Bourdieu La distinction Kenneth Burke A Rhetoric of Motives A Grammar of Motives John Brannigan New Historicism and Cultural Materialism Cleanth Brooks The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author Judith Butler Bodies That Matter Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity Cathy Caruth Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria Jonathan Culler Structuralist Poetics The Pursuit of Signs Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction Guy Debord The Society of the Spectacle Gilles Deleuze Difference and Repetition Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (pt.1) and A Thousand Plateaus (pt.2) Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology Writing and Difference Peter Dews The Limits of Disenchantment The Logic of Disintigration Terry Eagleton Marxism and Literary Criticism The Idea of Culture Antony Easthope The Unconscious William Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity Some Versions of Pastoral The Structure of Complex Words Norman Fairclough Language and Power Critical Discourse Analysis Frantz Fanon Black Skins, White Masks Stanley Fish Is There a Text in this Class? Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism Gerald Graff Literature Against Itself Jürgen Habermas Legitimation Crisis The Theory of Communicative Action, volumes 1 & 2 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Wolfgang Iser The Act of Reading: a Theory of Aesthetic Response Leonard Jackson The Poverty of Structuralism Fredric Jameson The Political Unconscious Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism The Prison-House of Language Frank Kermode Romantic Image Julia Kristeva Desire in Language Powers of Horror Jacques Lacan Ecrits The Seminars F.R. Leavis The Great Tradition Ania Loomba Colonialism/Postcolonialism Herbert Marcuse Reason and Revolution. Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory Eros and Civilization Soviet Marxism. A Critical Analysis One-Dimensional Man Toril Moi Sexual/Textual Politics I.A. Richards Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement Principles of Literary Criticism K.K. Ruthven Critical Assumptions Edward Said Culture and Imperialism Orientalism (1978) Jean-Paul Sartre What Is Literature? (1947) Ferdinand de Saussure Cours de linguistique générale (posthumously 1916) Alfred Schmidt The Concept of Nature in Marx (1962) Zur Idee der Kritischen Theorie (German, 1974) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Between Men Epistemology of the Closet Susan Sontag Against Interpretation Styles of Radical Will Under the Sign of Saturn Where The Stress Falls Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In Other Worlds Raymond Tallis Not Saussure Scott Wilson Cultural Materialism W.K. Wimsatt The Verbal Icon Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own Slavoj Žižek The Sublime Object of Ideology The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology
See also List of critical theorists Outline of critical theory Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)
References