ABSTRACT
In the first edition of A Reader’s Guide in 1985, the late Raman Selden was very conscious of how: until recently . . . most critics assumed, like Dr Johnson, that great literature
For good or ill, no such generalizations about the field of literary criticism could be made in the 1980s or since. To Raman Selden the end of the 1960s was the moment when things began to change, producing ‘a seemingly endless series of challenges to the consensus of common sense, many of them deriving from European (and especially French and Russian) intellectual sources. To the Anglo-Saxon tradition’, he commented, ‘this was a particularly nasty shock.’ He had in mind ‘structuralism’ and the added impact, soon after, of a poststructuralist critique of structuralism, aided by the psychoanalytic structuralism of Jacques Lacan. All of which, he could say at the time, ‘only confirmed ingrained prejudices’. These early movements will likely remain a challenge to those who come to them for the first time, and so too will the newer theories which have arrived on the scene in the subsequent thirty years. Literary theory and its near neighbour, cultural theory, have transformed our understanding of ‘English’ or Literary Studies. The previous five editions and now the sixth edition of this Guide have sought to track, explain and situate these new ideas and methods. The contents and balance – and length – of the book have accordingly changed. Nonetheless, we hope we have borne in mind the challenge that theory, in its unfamiliar language and concepts, presents to new students, young and old. Indeed, acknowledging
and responding to ‘the series of challenges to the consensus of common sense’ in Selden’s words, remains the main and most productive experience in our encounter with literary theory. We can all, however, benefit from some clear explication and open debate and this the Reader’s Guide means to provide and encourage.
