This is a list of important and seminal works in the field of critical theory.

• Theodor Adorno
  • Aesthetic Theory

• Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer
  • Dialectic of Enlightenment

• Louis Althusser
  • For Marx
  • Lenin and Philosophy

• 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

• Homi Bhabha
  • The Location of Culture

• Pierre Bourdieu
  • La distinction

• 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

• 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

• Franz Fanon
  • Black Skins, White Masks

• Stanley Fish
  • Is There a Text in this Class?

• Michel Foucault
  • Discipline and Punish
  • History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge
  • The Order of Things

• Gerald Graff
  • Literature Against Itself

• 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 Seminar"

• F.R. Leavis
  • The Great Tradition

• Ania Loomba
  • 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

• Jean-Paul Sartre
  • What is Literature?

• Ferdinand de Saussure
  • Cours de linguistique générale

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
  • Between Men
  • Epistemology of the Closet

• 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 Zizek
  • The Sublime Object of Ideology
  • The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology

See Also

• Critical Theory basic topics
• List of major critical theorists