Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory introduces readers to the careers, key texts, and central assumptions of six critics who have significantly influenced American literary theory during the past three decades - Paul de Man; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Elaine Showalter; Edward W. Said; Stephen Greenblatt; and Richard Rorty. Underscoring the largely heterogeneous mix of strategies and suppositions that these critics represent, Michael P.

Spikes offers concise analyses of their principal claims and illustrates how their works reflect a range of critical perspectives, from deconstruction, African American studies, and feminism to political criticism, new historicism, and neopragmatism.

Spikes prefaces his study with a short history of theory and criticism in the twentieth century and then places each of the theorists within the larger context of modern criticism. He explains their specific strategies for interpreting literature, identifies the philosophical assumptions underlying those strategies, cites specific examples of how the strategies are applied to the reading of particular works, and notes possible objections to their theories.

With this study Spikes renders the often-complex arguments and technical language of contemporary literary theory in accessible terms and gives readers a clear sense of the movements that have dominated the field during the past three decades.