Literature and Theory is designed to assist students to apply key critical theories to literary texts. Focusing on representative works and authors widely taught across classrooms in the world - Joyce, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Beckett, Eliot, and Octavia Butler - it picks up different aspects of studying literature in an accessible format. The volume also brings together chapters that represent major modern literary schools of thought, including structuralism, poststructuralism, myth criticism, queer theory, feminism, postcolonialism, and deconstruction.This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary and critical theory, as well as culture studies.