This work not only offers a comprehensive guide to English poetry, drama and the novel, but also includes expanded essays on post-colonial literature and twentieth-century literature, plus new entries on women's poetry, carnival, contradiction, desire, discourse, ideology, patriarchy, the subject, and the text. In addition, this work continues to feature the clearest and most useful of all guides to modern critical theory. In a thoroughly revised, expanded and up-to-date section, a sequence of entries explains traditional criticism, New Criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, reader-response theory, structuralism, deconstruction, post-structuralism and New Historicism.