In this revised edition of Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory, Michael P. Spikes adds Stanley Fish and Susan Bordo to the critics whose careers, key texts, and central assumptions he discusses in introducing readers to developments in American literary theory during the past thirty-five years. Underscoring the largely heterogeneous mix of strategies and suppositions that these critics, along with Paul de Man, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Edward W. Said, and Stephen Greenblatt, represent, Spikes offers concise analysis of their principal claims and illustrates how their works reflect a range of critical perspectives, from deconstruction, African American studies, and reader-response theory to political criticism, the new historicism, and feminism.