This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

Both Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva have made an enormous impact throughout the humanities with their work on signification, identity and difference, and yet the nature of the relation between their theories seems oddly indeterminate: they have sometimes been regarded as more or less indistinguishable and sometimes as incompatible This book aims at establishing precisely how Kristeva's and Derrida's writings may be articulated, tracing intersections and divergences, parallels and discontinuities between them. But how do you compare two theories of the production of difference? What conception of difference do you use to go about it? Any search for a dividing line between Derrida and Kristeva already engages with their preoccupations. Should the juxtaposition of these practices be conceived as a face-to-face confrontation or rather a gap, a hiatus? Could it be a dialectic? or a diff rance? Should it be thought of in terms of Kristeva's work . . . or Derrida's? Accessible and lively, this book studies the theories on their own terms, in terms of one another, and with regard to the literary text, a privileged object of their attention. It demonstrates that the articulation of the theories shifts under different discursive conditions such that a Derridean reading of the relation is unlikely to coincide with a Kristevan interpretation. It shows why there is no single answer to the question of how the two fit together. And it investigates what is at stake in the strategic uses to which their work is put, whether separately or together.

This in-depth critical assessment of the work of French psychoanalyst and literary theorist, Julia Kristeva, brings together for the first time readings both classical and new. Kristeva's writing on literature and psychoanalysis, language and social issues, as well as her fiction, are all considered. Each reading confronts questions raised by Kristeva's thought and contributes to giving an overview of her concerns. Chapters written especially for this volume take the reader into the most recent work of this most eminent thinker of the post-War era. Essays Address: yKristeva's writings in the 1960s and 1970s on the semiotic and on poetic language yThe implications for feminism, art, psychoanalysis and cultural difference of the works of the 1980s yKristeva's theory of revolt and the feminine genius in the writings of the 1990sBoth the non-specialist reader and the Kristeva scholar will find this to be an essential collection of criticism. Key Features yFull coverage of Kristeva's thought and writings yExplanatory and contextualising headnotes at the beginning of each reading yPrimary bibliography of Kristeva's works and a secondary bibliography of works cited yGlossary of key terms.

'Deconstruction', 'psychoanalysis', and 'semiotics' have become part of the vocabulary of contempoorary culture. Reading Theory introduces the principal texts by Derrida, Lacan and Kristeva that are behind these terms and that provide their contexts. This book concentrates its attention on making accessible what these three theorists have written, rather than offering a synthetic construction of the fashionable terminology of theory. Works carefully through key texts by the leading contemporary theorists Clear, accessible and introductory Challenges recent attacks on theory and on Derrida.