All these essays can be found in David Lodge's 20th Century Literary Criticism. The book is a wonderful investment for any serious reader/writer, due to many other essays by important writers and philosophers.
A) CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC CRITICISM
Aristiotle - Poetics
William Wordsworth - Preface to The Lyrical Ballads
Matthew Arnold - Function of Criticism
Key Concepts in Classical Criticism
1) Concepts of Order and Discipline.
2) The importance of Decorum
3) View of Reality
Key Concepts in Romantic Criticism
1) The emphasis on Imagination
2) Experimentation with new forms and themes
3) View of Reality
B) Formalism and Marxism
Victor Shklovsky - Art as Technique
Terry Eagleton - Marxism and Literary Criticism
Louis Althusser - The Ideological State Apparatus
Key Concepts in Formalism
Varieties of Formalism
Cultural Background of American Formalism
Cultural Background of Russian Formalism
Key Concepts in Marxism
The concepts of culture, language, literature and ideology
Cultural Theory
Literary Theory
C) Modernism and Post-Modernism
Ortega Ye Gasset - The Death Of The Novel
Ihab Hassan - The Post Modern Turn
Frederic Jameson - Postmodernsim and Consumer Society
Key Concepts in Modernism
1) The Modernist concept of the relationship between the self and the society
2) Experimentation in Forms and Themes - its pervasiveness in the other art forms
3) The value of wholeness, harmony and radiance
Key Concepts in Postmodernism
1) Incredulity towards all metanarratives
2) Revisioning the concepts of representation, subjectivity and official histories
3) Text as a tissue of quotations from various sites of culture
D) Feminism Postcolonialism and Reader Response
Toril Moi - Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory
Franz Fanon - Pifalls of National Consciousness
Stanley Fish - Is There a Text In This Class
Key Concepts in Feminism
Femininity as a linguistic construct
Central Theory or playful pluralism, feminist critique and gynocriticism
Queer Theory - problematising compulsory heterosexuality
Key Concepts in Post Colonialism
1) Strategies used in postcolonial discourse to subvert the value system of the coloniser which was paraded as universal.
2) Narrating nations (Homi Bhabha) and reacting to historical catalepsy (A Memmi)
3) Moving from a re-active to pro-active position
Key Concepts in Reader Response
1) Concepts of horizon of expectation, interpretative communities
2) The performance of the reader in the construction of the meaning of the text
3) Multiplicity of meanings due to life-to-text interactions
