Literary Theory

Theorist of the novel as a contest of voices — who wrote in obscurity and exile and was rediscovered late.

Structuralist turned post-structuralist — who declared the author dead and handed the text to the reader.

Founder of cultural materialism — who insisted that culture is ordinary and made by everyone.

The psychiatrist who anatomised the colonised mind — and argued that decolonisation is always violent.

The historian of madness, punishment, and sexuality — who redefined power as something that produces rather than forbids.

The philosopher of deconstruction — who showed that every text undoes the oppositions it depends on.

The founder of postcolonial studies — who showed that the West produced the East as an object of knowledge and rule.

Theorist of écriture féminine — a writing of the body against the binaries of Western thought.

Coined gynocriticism and mapped a tradition of women's writing rather than reading women against men.

Deconstruction, Marxism, and feminism brought together to ask whether the colonised can be heard at all.

Britain's best-known Marxist critic — and the author of the book most students meet theory through.

The theorist of hybridity and mimicry — who found the coloniser's authority unstable at the point of its own imitation.

Founder of queer theory alongside Butler — who read the closet as a structure organising all modern culture.

The theorist of gender as performance — whose Gender Trouble founded queer theory as a field.