As an academic fashion, the Anglo-American literary post-structuralist movement collapsed with extreme suddenness shortly after the first publication of this book in 1989. No credit is being claimed here for that collapse, which (aside from any question of the operation of a Zeitgeist) must be put down at least in part to the greater-than-usual aesthetic sterility of the movement itself and to its inability to appeal to any but the most aesthetically insensitive and theoretically obsessed of readers – a category that recently seems to have included many graduate students in leading American and British universities. In preparing this second edition I have allowed the opening chapter on Saussurian and post-Saussurian literary theory to stand, not because I believe that theory still to have any real life in it, but because it seems to me important that the theory itself should not be allowed to disappear altogether before it has been clearly seen to be dead on philosophical grounds as well as from a merely fashionable point of view. Part of the purpose of this new edition is to make such a state of affairs more likely, and I have added now, as an appendix to the original text, an essay on the poetic theory of Romanticism which I hope may suggest some aesthetically non-sterile critical ways in which we might at last once again begin to move forward.

The theoretical void which has been left by the bankruptcy of post-structuralist theory is necessarily also a spiritual void.