The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader

Everything is open to question. Nothing is sacred.
Critical and cultural theory invites a rethinking of some of our most basic assumptions about who we are, how we behave, and how we interpret the world around us.
The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader brings together 29 key pieces from the last century and a half that have shaped the field. Topics include: subjectivity, language, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, the body, the human, class, culture, everyday life, literature, psychoanalysis, technology, power, and visuality. The choice of texts, together with the editors' introduction and glossary, will allow newcomers to begin from first principles, while the use of unabridged readings will also make the volume suitable for those undertaking more specialized work. Material is arranged chronologically, but the editors have suggested thematic pathways through the selections.

Neil Badmington is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Criticism and English Literature at Cardiff University. He is the author of Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (2004) and editor of Posthumanism (2000).
Julia Thomas is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University. She is the author of Victorian Narrative Painting (2000), Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (2004), and editor of Reading Images (2000).

Pathways Acknowledgments Editors’ Introduction 1. Karl Marx, ‘Preface (to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)’, 1859. 2. Sigmund Freud, 'A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis', 1912. 3. Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘Linguistic Value’, 1916. 4. Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, 1929. 5. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 1936. 6. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, 1949. 7. Frantz Fanon, ‘The Fact of Blackness’, 1952. 8. Raymond Williams, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, 1958. 9. Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Social Text’, 1961. 10. Hayden White, ‘The Burden of History’, 1966. 11. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, 1968. 12. Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, 1968. 13. Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’, 1974. 14. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘What is a Minor Literature?’, 1975. 15. Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’, 1975. 16. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, 1975. 17. Edward Said, Introduction to Orientalism, 1978. 18. Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, 1980. 19. Julia Kristeva, ‘Approaching Abjection’, 1980. 20. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Science Fiction’, 1981. 21. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?’, 1982. 22. Gayle Rubin, ‘Thinking Sex: Notes Towards a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, 1984. 23. Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, 1985. 24. Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue’, 1987. 25. Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, 1991. 26. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, 1991. 27. Giorgio Agamben, Introduction to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1995. 28. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?’, 1995 29. Marjorie Garber, ‘Who Owns "Human Nature"?’, 2003. Glossary Index