This is a list of important and seminal works in the field of critical theory.
Otto Maria Carpeaux
História da Literatura Ocidental, 8 vol. (Portuguese, 1959–66)
M. H. Abrams
The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
Theodor Adorno
Aesthetic Theory
Negative Dialectics
Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Louis Althusser
For Marx
Lenin and Philosophy
Erich Auerbach
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
Mikhail Bakhtin
Discourse in the Novel
Rabelais and his World
Roland Barthes
Image, Music, Text
Mythologies
Jean Baudrillard
The Perfect Crime
Simulation and Simulacra
Walter Benjamin
Illuminations
The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Homi K. Bhabha
The Location of Culture
Pierre Bourdieu
La distinction
Kenneth Burke
A Rhetoric of Motives
A Grammar of Motives
John Brannigan
New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
Cleanth Brooks
The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry
Sean Burke
The Death and Return of the Author
Judith Butler
Bodies That Matter
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Cathy Caruth
Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Biographia Literaria
Jonathan Culler
Structuralist Poetics
The Pursuit of Signs
Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
Gilles Deleuze
Difference and Repetition
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (pt.1) and A Thousand Plateaus (pt.2)
Jacques Derrida
Of Grammatology
Writing and Difference
Peter Dews
The Limits of Disenchantment
The Logic of Disintigration
Terry Eagleton
Marxism and Literary Criticism
The Idea of Culture
Antony Easthope
The Unconscious
William Empson
Seven Types of Ambiguity
Some Versions of Pastoral
The Structure of Complex Words
Norman Fairclough
Language and Power
Critical Discourse Analysis
Frantz Fanon
Black Skins, White Masks
Stanley Fish
Is There a Text in this Class?
Northrop Frye
Anatomy of Criticism
Gerald Graff
Literature Against Itself
Jürgen Habermas
Legitimation Crisis
The Theory of Communicative Action, volumes 1 & 2
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
Wolfgang Iser
The Act of Reading: a Theory of Aesthetic Response
Leonard Jackson
The Poverty of Structuralism
Fredric Jameson
The Political Unconscious
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
The Prison-House of Language
Frank Kermode
Romantic Image
Julia Kristeva
Desire in Language
Powers of Horror
Jacques Lacan
Ecrits
The Seminars
F.R. Leavis
The Great Tradition
Ania Loomba
Colonialism/Postcolonialism
Herbert Marcuse
Reason and Revolution. Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory
Eros and Civilization
Soviet Marxism. A Critical Analysis
One-Dimensional Man
Toril Moi
Sexual/Textual Politics
I.A. Richards
Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement
Principles of Literary Criticism
K.K. Ruthven
Critical Assumptions
Edward Said
Culture and Imperialism
Orientalism (1978)
Jean-Paul Sartre
What Is Literature? (1947)
Ferdinand de Saussure
Cours de linguistique générale (posthumously 1916)
Alfred Schmidt
The Concept of Nature in Marx (1962)
Zur Idee der Kritischen Theorie (German, 1974)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Between Men
Epistemology of the Closet
Susan Sontag
Against Interpretation
Styles of Radical Will
Under the Sign of Saturn
Where The Stress Falls
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
"Can the Subaltern Speak?"
In Other Words
Raymond Tallis
Not Saussure
Scott Wilson
Cultural Materialism
W.K. Wimsatt
The Verbal Icon
Virginia Woolf
A Room of One's Own
Slavoj Žižek
The Sublime Object of Ideology
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology
