Now in a fully updated second edition The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory is an indispensible guide for anyone approaching the field for the first time. Exploring ideas from a diverse range of disciplines through a series of 11 critical essays and a dictionary of key names and terms, this book examines some of the most complex and fundamental theories in modern scholarship including: * Marxism * Trauma Theory * Ecocriticism * Psychoanalysis * Feminism * Posthumanism * Gender and Queer Theory * Structuralism * Narrative * Postcolonialism * Deconstruction * Postmodernism With three new essays, an updated introduction, further reading and a wealth of new dictionary entries, this text is an indispensible guide for all students of the theoretically informed arts, humanities and social sciences.