ABSTRACT
Although there is no ideal moment to produce a Critical Theory Reader the selection of texts can at least be informed by an estimate of the current intellectual situation. Critical Theory is patently no longer the up-and-coming field it was when the first post-New Criticism anthologies appeared in the early 1980s. In spite of damaging funding cuts and constraints, there has been a marked growth of theory and theory-related courses over the past fifteen years, with academic appointments (though not enough) to staff them. Indeed, as Perry Anderson and then Christopher Norris have observed, there is probably a relationship between hard political times and the flourishing of theory (see Anderson, 1979; Norris, 1990). But — less sceptically — publishers’ lists convey the remarkable extent and high level of intellectual activity as well as the increasing interest in theory on the part of undergraduates and postgraduates, and beyond higher education as well. And, most revealingly, the minor genre of anti-theory polemics has taken a turn which suggests that it is the traditional disciplines or sections of those disciplines which feel embattled. In sum, Critical Theory is on the way to becoming established — so much so that its radical credentials are being challenged by a revived Cultural Studies, as well as by doubts that even a structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist loop cannot contain current theorisations of, for example, gender and race. It sounds almost heretical to say so, but there is the basis for a canon in ‘Critical Theory’, itself now the most acceptable, if imprecise, generic name for a body of texts which reflects critically upon claims for disciplinary knowledge while occupying an (almost) indispensable position in a number of humanities and social science disciplines.
