Introduction Summary and Analysis

Peter Barry's 290-page "Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory" is first published in 1995 with a Second Edition in 2002. This non-fiction and quasi-historical text provides an introduction to more than a dozen literary and cultural theories from liberal humanism to twentieth-century ecocriticism. The author is an English Professor at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, Wales, UK where he teaches several theory courses. Barry becomes aware as an undergraduate at London University in the 1960s that instruction in literary theory is deficient. The first course in literature then is "Beowulf to Virginia Woolf." He writes this book to cure a deficiency from his undergraduate studies and to close that gap for new students of literature.

Literary theory becomes fashionable and controversial in the 1980s and remains so until the 1990s when it becomes a standard course in school curriculum...