Introduction

Taking its cue from Leslie Fiedler, who back in the 1950s famously claimed that literary criticism is “always becoming ‘something else,’ for the simple reason that literature has always been ‘something else’”, this volume explores the versatility of theory in times after and beyond its presumed historical heyday and in an institutional framework that proves hostile to theory as a mere set of “language games” (Kenyon Review 12(4):564, 1950). Against received schemata, this volume resists the recurrent epochal proclamations of a manifold after-, post-, and against-theory.