'Deconstruction', 'psychoanalysis', and 'semiotics' have become part of the vocabulary of contempoorary culture. Reading Theory introduces the principal texts by Derrida, Lacan and Kristeva that are behind these terms and that provide their contexts. This book concentrates its attention on making accessible what these three theorists have written, rather than offering a synthetic construction of the fashionable terminology of theory.

• Works carefully through key texts by the leading contemporary theorists
• Clear, accessible and introductory
• Challenges recent attacks on theory and on Derrida.

Michael Payne is John P. Crozer Professor and Heaad of English at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Irony in Shakespeare's Roman Plays and the editor of several volumes of criticism and theory, including the forthcoming Blackwell Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory.