Theory and Criticism

I. MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS AND MOVEMENTS

Cultural studies

  1. Roland Barthes

  2. Walter Benjamin

  3. Ian Bogost

  4. Susan Bordo

  5. Marc Bousquet

  6. Rosi Braidotti

  7. Ray Chow

  8. Frantz Fanon

  9. Michel Foucault

  10. Paul Gilroy

  11. Antonio Gramsci

  12. Jurgen Habermas

  13. Judith Jack Halberstam

  14. Stuart Hall

  15. Donna Haraway

  16. Dick Hebdige

  17. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

  18. E. Ann Kaplan

  19. Bruno Latour

  20. Alondra Nelson

  21. Andrew Ross

  22. Edward. W. Said

  23. Raymond Williams

  24. Slavoj Zizek

Deconstruction and Poststructuralism

  1. Roland Barthes

  2. Jean Baudrillard

  3. Homi K. Bhabha

  4. Rosi Braidotti

  5. Judith Butler

  6. Helene Cixous

  7. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

  8. Paul de Man

  9. Jacques Derrida

  10. Michel Foucault

  11. Julia Kristeva

  12. Jacques Lacan

  13. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Feminist Theory and Criticism

  1. Simone de Beauvoir

  2. Susan Bordo

  3. Rosi Braidotti

  4. Judith Butler

  5. Helene Cixous

  6. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

  7. Donna Haraway

  8. E. Ann Kaplan

  9. Laura Mulvey

  10. Alondra Nelson

  11. Adrienne Rich

  12. Gayle Rubin

  13. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  14. Monique Wittig

  15. Virginia Wolf

Formalism

  1. Aristotle

  2. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus

  3. Cleanth Brooks

  4. T.S. Eliot

  5. John Crowe Ransom

  6. William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley

Gay and Lesbian Criticism and Queer Theory

  1. Gloria Anzaldúa

  2. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner

  3. Judith Butler

  4. Michel Foucault

  5. Judith Jack Halberstam

  6. Adrienne Rich

  7. Gayle Rubin

  8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

  9. Monique Wittig

MARXISM

  1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

  2. Louis Althusser

  3. Walter Benjamin

  4. Lennard J. Davis

  5. Antonio Gramsci

  6. Stuart Hall

  7. Donna Haraway

  8. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

  9. David Harvey

  10. Dick Hebdige

  11. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

  12. Fredric Jameson

  13. György Lukács

  14. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  15. Raymond Williams

  16. Slavoj Zizek

New Historicism

  1. Giorgio Agamben

  2. Michel Foucault

  3. Stephen Greenblatt

  4. Karatani Kojin

  5. Mark McGurl

  6. Kenneth W. Warren

  7. Hayden White

  8. Gift Blessing*

Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and READER-RESPONSE THEORY

  1. Roland Barthes

  2. Simone de Beauvoir

  3. Jane Bennett

  4. Stanley E. Fish

  5. N. Katherine Hayles

  6. Martin Heidegger

  7. Wolfgang Iser

  8. Friedrich Schleiermacher

  9. Susan Sontag

  10. Baruch Spinoza

  11. Jean-Paul Sartre

Postcolonial Theory and Criticism

  1. Chinua Achebe

  2. Benedict Anderson

  3. Homi K. Bhabha

  4. Rey Chow

  5. Hamid Dabashi

  6. Frantz Fanon

  7. Paul Gilroy

  8. C. D. Narasimhaiah

  9. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Taban Lo Liyong, Henry Owour-Anyumba

  10. Rob Nixon

  11. Edward W. Said

  12. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

PSYCHOANALYSIS

  1. Louis Althusser

  2. Harold Bloom

  3. Judith Butler

  4. Lennard J. Davis

  5. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

  6. Sigmund Freud

  7. Carl Gustav Jung*

  8. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

  9. Judith Jack Halberstam

  10. E. Ann Kaplan

  11. Julia Kristeva

  12. Jacques Lacan

  13. Laura Mulvey

  14. Kelly Oliver

  15. Slavoj Zizek

Race and Ethnicity Studies

  1. Adunis

  2. Gloria Anzaldúa

  3. Rey Chow

  4. W.E.B Du Bois

  5. Henry Louis Gates Jr.

  6. Paul Gilroy

  7. bell hooks

  8. Langston Hughes

  9. Zora Neale Hurston

  10. Toni Morrison

  11. Alondra Nelson

  12. Kenneth W. Warren

  13. Derrick Bell*

  14. Kimberlé Crenshaw*

Structuralism and Semiotics

  1. Louis Althusser

  2. Roland Barthes

  3. Northrop Frye

  4. Dick Hebdige

  5. Roman Jakobson

  6. Claude Levi-Strauss

  7. Franco Moretti

  8. Ferdinand de Saussure

  9. Tzvetan Todorov

  10. A.J. Greimas*

  11. Gerard Genette*

  12. Hayden White

II. GENRES

Epic and romance

  1. Aristotle

  2. Erich Auerbach

  3. Mikhail Bakhtin

  4. Northrop Frye

  5. Giacopo Mazzoni

  6. Plato

  7. Giambattista Vico

Drama

  1. Aristotle

  2. Aphra Behn

  3. Pierre Corneille

  4. John Dryden

  5. Samuel Johnson

  6. Friedrich Nietzche

  7. Sir Philip Sidney

The Novel

  1. Mikhail Bakhtin

  2. Henry James

  3. Samuel Johnson

  4. F.R Leavis

  5. György Lucacz

  6. Mark McGurl

  7. Franco Moretti

  8. Toni Morrison

  9. Richard Ohmann

  10. Germaine Necker de Stael

  11. Lionel Trilling

  12. Kenneth W. Warren

Poetry

  1. Adunis

  2. Harold Bloom

  3. Giovanni Boccaccio

  4. T.S Eliot

  5. Ralph Waldo Emerson

  6. Stanley E. Fish

  7. Martin Heidegger

  8. Horace

  9. Roman Jakobson

  10. Julia Kristeva

  11. Giacopo Mazozoni

  12. Edgar Allan Poe

  13. Percy Bysshe Shelley

  14. Sir Philip Sidney

  15. Giambattista Vico

  16. William Wordsworth

Popular Culture

  1. Roland Barthes

  2. Simone de Bouvoire

  3. Walter Benjamin

  4. Ian Bogost

  5. Susan Bordo

  6. Rey Chow

  7. Judith Jack Halberstam

  8. Donna Haraway

  9. Dick Hebdige

  10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

  11. Fredric Jameson

  12. Bruno Latour

  13. Laura Mulvey

  14. Alondra Nelson

  15. Richard Ohmann

  16. Susan Sontag

  17. Slavoj Zizek

III. HISTORICAL PERIOD

Classical Theory and Criticism

  1. Aristotle

  2. Gorgias

  3. Horace

  4. Longinus

  5. Plato

  6. Plotinus*

Medieval Theory and Criticism

  1. Augustine

  2. Giovanni Boccaccio

  3. Christine de Pizan

  4. Dante Alighieri

  5. Moses Maimonides

  6. Thomas Aquinas

Renaissance Theory and Criticism

  1. Giovanni Boccaccio

  2. Pierre Corneille

  3. Joachim du Bellay

  4. Giacopo Mazzoni

  5. Sir Philip Sidney

Frankfurt School*

  1. Max Horkheimer

  2. Theodor W. Adorno

  3. Herbert Marcuse

  4. Walter Benjamin

  5. Erich Fromm

  6. Jürgen Habermas

  7. Friedrich Pollock

ENLIGHTENMENT THEORY AND CRITICISM

  1. Joseph Addison

  2. Aphra Behn

  3. Edmund Burke

  4. John Dryden

  5. David Hume

  6. Samuel Johnson

  7. Immanuel Kant

  8. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

  9. Alexander Pope

  10. Friedrich von Schiller

  11. Baruch Spinoza

  12. Giambattista Vico

  13. Mary Wollstonecraft

ROMANTIC THEORY AND CRITICISM

  1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  2. Ralph Waldo Emerson

  3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  4. Friedrich von Schiller

  5. Friedrich Schleiermacher

  6. Percy Bysshe Shelley

  7. Germaine Necker de Staël

  8. William Wordsworth

VICTORIAN THEORY AND CRITICISM

  1. Matthew Arnold

  2. Henry James

  3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

  4. Walter Pater

  5. Edgar Allan Poe

  6. Oscar Wilde

Part IV: ISSUES AND TOPICS

AESTHETICS

  1. Walter Benjamin

  2. Jane Bennett

  3. Pierre Bourdieu

  4. Edmund Burke

  5. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  6. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

  7. David Hume

  8. Immanuel Kant

  9. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

  10. Li Zehou

  11. Longinus

  12. Timothy Morton

  13. C.D. Narasimhaiah

  14. Alondra Nelson

  15. Sianne Ngai

  16. Walter Pater

  17. Friedrich von Schiller

Affect

  1. Joseph Addison

  2. Aristotle

  3. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner

  4. Edmund Burke

  5. Rey Chow

  6. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

  7. Wolfgang Iser

  8. Immanuel Kant

  9. E. Ann Kaplan

  10. Julia Kristeva

  11. Li Zehou

  12. Longinus

  13. Sianne Ngai

  14. Kelly Oliver

  15. Walter Pater

  16. Plato

  17. Edgar Allan Poe

  18. Sir Philip Sidney

Authorship

  1. Roland Barthes

  2. Walter Benjamin

  3. Christine de Pizan

  4. T. S. Eliot

  5. Michel Foucault

  6. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

  7. Horace

  8. F.R Leavis

  9. Longinus

  10. William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley

THE BODY

  1. Giorgio Agamben

  2. Susan Bordo

  3. Judith Butler

  4. Hélène Cixous

  5. Lennard J. Davis

  6. Michel Foucault

  7. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

  8. Judith Jack Halberstam

  9. Donna Haraway

  10. N. Katherine Hayles

  11. E. Ann Kaplan

  12. Julia Kristeva

  13. Li Zehou

  14. Laura Mulvey

  15. C.D. Narasimhaiah

THE CANON/TRADITION

  1. Matthew Arnold

  2. Erich Auerbach

  3. Harold Bloom

  4. T. S. Eliot

  5. Gerald Graff

  6. F.R. Leavis

  7. Mark McGurl

  8. Toni Morrison

  9. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Taban Lo Liyong, Henry Owuor-Anyumba

  10. Richard Ohmann

  11. Percy Bysshe Shelley

  12. Leo Strauss

  13. Lionel Trilling

  14. Kenneth W. Warren

DEFENSES OF CRITICISM

  1. Matthew Arnold

  2. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus

  3. Homi K. Bhabha

  4. Bruno Latour

  5. C.D. Narasimhaiah

  6. Martha C. Nussbaum

  7. Alexander Pope

  8. John Crowe Ransom

  9. Leo Strauss

  10. Oscar Wilde

  11. William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley

Ethics

  1. Chinua Achebe

  2. Hannah Arendt

  3. Matthew Arnold

  4. Christine de Pizan

  5. Friedrich August von Hayek

  6. Timothy Morton

  7. Martha C. Nussbaum

  8. Kelly Oliver

  9. Plato

  10. Percy Bysshe Shelley

  11. Sir Philip Sidney

  12. Mary Wollstonecraft

  13. Immanuel Kant*

Gender and Sexuality

  1. Simone de Beauvoir

  2. Susan Bordo

  3. Judith Butler

  4. Hélène Cixous

  5. Michel Foucault

  6. Sigmund Freud

  7. Judith Jack Halberstam

  8. E. Ann Kaplan

  9. Julia Kristeva

  10. Jacques Lacan

  11. Laura Mulvey

  12. Gayle Rubin

  13. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

  14. Monique Wittig

Globalization

  1. Adunis

  2. Erich Auerbach

  3. Rey Chow

  4. Hamid Dabashi

  5. Jacques Derrida

  6. Frantz Fanon

  7. Paul Gilroy

  8. Donna Haraway

  9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

  10. David Harvey

  11. Friedrich August von Hayek

  12. Karatani Kojin

  13. Claude Levi-Strauss

  14. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

  15. Franco Moretti

  16. Timothy Morton

  17. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Taban Lo Liyong, Henry Owuor-Anyumba

  18. Rob Nixon

  19. Edward W. Said

  20. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  21. Giambattista Vico

IDEOLOGY AND HEGEMONY

  1. Louis Althusser

  2. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner

  3. Ian Bogost

  4. Pierre Bourdieu

  5. Lennard J. Davis

  6. Antonio Gramsci

  7. Stuart Hall

  8. Fredric Jameson

  9. Dick Hebdige

  10. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

  11. Timothy Morton

  12. Raymond Williams

  13. Slavoj Zizek

THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF LITERARY STUDY

  1. Marc Bousquet

  2. Terry Eagleton

  3. Gerald Graff

  4. Mark McGurl

  5. Toni Morrison

  6. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Taban Lo Liyong, Henry Owuor-Anyumba

  7. Richard Ohmann

  8. John Crowe Ransom

  9. Edward W. Said

  10. Lionel Trilling

  11. Kenneth W. Warren

  12. Gift Blessing*

INTERPRETATION THEORY

  1. Augustine

  2. Dante Alighieri

  3. Stanley E. Fish

  4. Sigmund Freud

  5. N. Katherine Hayles

  6. Fredric Jameson

  7. Moses Maimonides

  8. Friedrich Schleiermacher

  9. Susan Sontag

  10. Baruch Spinoza

  11. Thomas Aquinas

Language

  1. Benedict Anderson

  2. Augustine

  3. J.L. Austin

  4. Mikhail Bakhtin

  5. Jean Baudrillard

  6. Martin Heidegger

  7. Zora Neale Hurston

  8. Roman Jakobson

  9. Julia Kristeva

  10. Jacques Lacan

  11. Claude Levi-Strauss

  12. Friedrich Nietzche

  13. Ferdinand de Saussure

  14. Baruch Spinoza

Literary History

  1. Erich Auerbach

  2. Hamid Dabashi

  3. Paul Gilroy

  4. F.R Leavis

  5. György Lukacz

  6. Franco Moretti

  7. Toni Morrison

  8. Sianne Ngai

  9. Edward. W. Said

  10. Lionel Trilling

  11. Kenneth W. Warren

Media

  1. Louis Althusser

  2. Roland Barthes

  3. Walter Benjamin

  4. Ian Bogost

  5. Susan Bordo

  6. Rey Chow

  7. Lennard J. Davis

  8. Jürgen Habermas

  9. N. Katherine Hayles

  10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

  11. Zora Neale Hurston

  12. Laura Mulvey

  13. Alondra Nelson

  14. Richard Ohmann

  15. Susan Sontag

  16. Slavoj Zizek

Modernity

  1. Adunis

  2. Giorgio Agamben

  3. Benedict Anderson

  4. Walter Benjamin

  5. Pierre Bourdieu

  6. Rey Chow

  7. Hamid Dabashi

  8. Joachim de Bellay

  9. T. S. Eliot

  10. Paul Gilroy

  11. Jürgen Habermas

  12. Friedrich August von Hayek

  13. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

  14. Fredric Jameson

  15. E. Ann Kaplan

  16. Karatani Köjin

  17. György Lukacz

  18. Timothy Morton

  19. Sianne Ngai

  20. Friedrich von Schiller

  21. Leo Strauss

  22. Lionel Trilling

NARRATIVE THEORY

  1. Aristotle

  2. Erich Auerbach

  3. Mikhail Bakhtin

  4. Roland Barthes

  5. Northrop Frye

  6. David Herman

  7. Roman Jakobson

  8. Fredric Jameson

  9. F.R. Leavis

  10. György Lukacz

  11. Franco Moretti

  12. Laura Mulvey

  13. Rob Nixon

  14. Martha C. Nussbaum

  15. Germaine Necker de Staël

  16. Tzvetan Todorov

  17. A.J. Greimas*

  18. Gerard Genette*

  19. Hayden White

  20. Jean-Francois Lyotard*

  21. Carl Gustav Jung*

  22. Gift Blessing*

Philology

  1. Adunis

  2. Erich Auerbach

  3. Friedric Jameson

  4. C.D. Narasimhaiah

  5. Friedrich Nietzche

  6. Edward. W. Said

  7. Friedrich Schleiermacher

  8. Baruch Spinoza

  9. Giambattista Vico

POSTMODERNITY

  1. Michel Foucault*

  2. Jacques Derrida*

  3. Jean Baudrillard

  4. Mark Bousquet

  5. Rosi Braidotti

  6. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

  7. Terry Eagleton

  8. Donna Haraway

  9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

  10. David Harvey

  11. N. Katherine Hayles

  12. bell hooks

  13. Friedric Jameson

  14. Jean-Francois Lyotard

  15. Alondra Nelson

  16. Rob Nixon

POST-POSTMODERNITY*

  1. Thimotheus Vermeleun & Robin van den Akker (Metamodernism)

  2. Gilles Lipovetsky (Hypermodernism)

  3. Alan Kirby (Digimodernism)

  4. Nicholas Bourriaud (Altermodernism)

  5. Robert Samuels (Automodernism)

Print Culture

  1. Benedict Anderson

  2. Walter Benjamin

  3. Pierre Bourdieu

  4. Michel Foucault

  5. N. Katherine Hayles

  6. Zora Neale Hurston

  7. Claude Levi-Strauss

  8. Franco Moretti

  9. Leo Strauss

Religion

  1. Adunis

  2. Louis Althusser

  3. Matthew Arnold

  4. Erich Auerbach

  5. Augustine

  6. Rosi Braidotti

  7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  8. Dante Alighieriee

  9. Terry Eagleton

  10. Ralph Waldo Emerson

  11. Northrop Frye

  12. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

  13. Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel

  14. Moses Maimonides

  15. Giacopo Mazzoni

  16. Gayle Rubin

  17. Plato

  18. Friedrich Schleiermacher

  19. Percy Bysshe Shelley

  20. Sir Philip Sidney

  21. Baruch Spinoza

  22. Thomas Aquinas

  23. Giambattista Vico

Representation and Realism

  1. Aristotle

  2. Erich Auerbach

  3. Jane Bennett

  4. Ian Bogost

  5. Rey Chow

  6. Pierre Corneille

  7. Lennard J. Davis

  8. Karatani Köjin

  9. F.R. Leavis

  10. Longinus

  11. György Lukacz

  12. Giacopo Mazzoni

  13. Friedrich Nietzche

  14. Rob Nixon

  15. Plato

  16. Sir. Philip Sydney

  17. Hayden White

Rhetoric

  1. Aristotle

  2. Augustine

  3. Ian Bogost

  4. Paul de Man

  5. Gorgias

  6. Zora Neale Hurston

  7. Jacques Lacan

  8. Longinus

  9. Giacopo Mazzoni

  10. Giambattista Vico

  11. Hayden White

Subjectivity and Identity

  1. Giorgio Agamben

  2. Louis Althusser

  3. Gloria Anzaldúa

  4. Hannah Arendt

  5. Susan Bordo

  6. Rosi Braidotti

  7. Judith Butler

  8. W.E.B Du Bois

  9. Frantz Fanon

  10. Michel Foucault

  11. Sigmund Freud

  12. Judith Jack Halberstam

  13. Donna Haraway

  14. Friedrich August von Hayek

  15. Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel

  16. Jean-Paul Sartre*

  17. bell hooks

  18. Karatani Köjin

  19. Jacques Lacan

  20. Timothy Morton

  21. Laura Mulvey

  22. Alondra Nelson

  23. Kelly Oliver

  24. Adrienne Rich

  25. Friedrich von Schiller

  26. Monique Wittig

  27. Slavoj Zizek

The Vernacular and Nationhood

  1. Benedict Anderson

  2. Gloria Anzaldúa

  3. Pierre Corneille

  4. Hamid Dabashi

  5. Dante Alighieri

  6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

  7. Joachim de Bellay

  8. Ralph Waldo Emerson

  9. Frantz Fanon

  10. Langston Hughes

  11. F.R Leavis

  12. György Lukács

  13. C.D. Narasimhaiah

  14. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Taban Lo Liyong, Henry Owuor-Anyumba

  15. Giambattista Vico

  16. Kenneth W. Warren

Women’s Literature

  1. Aphra Behn

  2. Hélène Cixous

  3. Christine de Pizan

  4. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

  5. Germaine Necker de Staël

  6. Mary Wollstonecraft

  7. Virginia Wolf

* Our list of theorists and critics was compiled through a meta-synthesis of relevant anthologies. We systematically reviewed, compared, and synthesized information from each anthology to identify key figures in the field. While efforts were made to be comprehensive, limitations such as anthology scope and availability may have influenced the selection. This statement aims to provide transparency regarding our methodology.