Engaged debate among feminist political and psychoanalytic thinkers has secured Julia
Kristeva's status as one of the most formidable figures in twentieth-century critical theory.
Nevertheless her precise relevance to the study of literature - the extent to which her theory
is specifically a literary theory - can be hard for new readers to fathom.This approachable
volume explores Kristeva's definition of literature her methods for analyzing it and the
theoretical ground on which those endeavors are based. Megan Becker-Leckrone argues that
Kristeva's signature concepts such as abjection and intertextuality lose much of their force
when readers extract them from the specific complex theoretical context in which Kristeva
produces them. Early chapters situate her theory in a broader conversation with Roland Barthes
Sigmund Freud Jacques Lacan and others around the issues of reading textuality and
subjectivity. Subsequent chapters look at Kristeva's actual engagements with literary texts
specifically her challenging highly performative reading of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand
Céline in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection and her career-long preoccupation with James
Joyce. A final chapter of the book looks at the way contemporary literary critics have
marshaled her ideas in re-reading the poetry of William Wordsworth while a helpful glossary
identifies Kristeva's most pertinently literary theoretical concepts by way of synopses of the
texts in which she presents them.
