Reading list

Cultural and Literary Theory: Verso Student Reading

Our Cultural and Literary Theory reading for the academic year ahead: all up to 40% off until the end of September.

Verso Books29 August 2022

Cultural and Literary Theory: Verso Student Reading

We bring you a list of books to fill your Cultural and Literary Theory shelves, including key titles from the likes of Oscar Wilde, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Mark Greif, Michele Wallace and Fredric Jameson.  

Student reading sale: ends September 30
30% off if you buy 3 or more titles
40% off if you buy 4 or more titles
Discount will be applied in cart. Separate orders can't be combined.
See all our Student Reading here.

[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]

See all our recommended Student Reading here.

Book strip #1

  • Understanding Brecht

    Understanding Brecht

    by Walter Benjamin

    Introduction by Stanley Mitchell

    Translated by Anna Bostock

    The relationship between philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin and playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht was both a lasting friendship and a powerful intellectual partnership. Having met in the late 1920s in...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • Class War

    Class War

    by Mark Steven

    A thrilling and vivid work of history, Class War weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat. In a narrative that spans the...
  • Culture and Politics

    Culture and Politics

    by Raymond Williams

    Raymond Williams was a pioneering scholar of cultural and society, and one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. In this, a collection of difficult to find essays, some of whic...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • Invisibility Blues

    Invisibility Blues

    by Michele Wallace

    First published in 1990, Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallace’s considerations of the black experience in America include ...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • Osip Mandelstam

    Osip Mandelstam

    by Ralph Dutli

    Translated by Ben Fowkes

    This is the first full-scale biography of Osip Mandelstam to combine an analysis of his poetry with a description of his personal life, from his beginnings as a young intellectual in pre-revolution...
  • Politics and Letters

    Politics and Letters

    by Raymond Williams

    Introduction by Geoff Dyer

    Raymond Williams made a central contribution to the intellectual culture of the Left in the English-speaking world. He was also one of the key figures in the foundation of cultural studies in Bri...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • Against World Literature

    Against World Literature

    by Emily Apter

    Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • The Function of Criticism

    The Function of Criticism

    by Terry Eagleton

    This wide-ranging book argues that criticism emerged in early bourgeois society as a central feature of a “public sphere” in which political, ethical, and literary judgements could mingle under the...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • Mimesis

    Mimesis

    by Valery Podoroga

    Translated by Evgeni V. Pavlov

    Valery Podoroga was one of the most important thinkers of his generation. Here his most famous work is translated into English for the first time. In it he gives a panorama view of Russian writing,...
  • Brecht and Method

    Brecht and Method

    by Fredric Jameson

    The legacy of Bertolt Brecht is much contested, whether by those who wish to forget or to vilify his politics, but his stature as the outstanding political playwright and poet of the twentieth cent...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • The Antinomies of Realism

    The Antinomies of Realism

    by Fredric Jameson

    The Antinomies of Realism is a history of the nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it imp...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • The Modernist Papers

    The Modernist Papers

    by Fredric Jameson

    The Modernist Papers is a tour de force of analysis and criticism, in which Jameson brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centurie...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • A Singular Modernity

    A Singular Modernity

    by Fredric Jameson

    The concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this intervention, Fredric Jameson—perhaps the m...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • The Cultural Turn

    The Cultural Turn

    by Fredric Jameson

    Fredric Jameson, a leading voice on the subject of postmodernism, assembles his most powerful writings on the culture of late capitalism in this essential volume. Classic insights on pastiche, nost...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • Edward Said

    Edward Said

    by Dominique Eddé

    Translated by Ros Schwartz and Trista Selous

    In this personal portrait of Edward Said written by a close friend, Dominique Eddé offers a fascinating and fresh presentation of his oeuvre from his earliest writings on Joseph Conrad to his most ...
  • The Age of the Poets

    The Age of the Poets

    by Alain Badiou

    Introduction by Emily Apter and Bruno Bosteels

    Translated by Bruno Bosteels

    The Age of the Poets revisits the age-old problem of the relation between literature and philosophy, arguing against both Plato and Heidegger’s famous arguments. Philosophy neither has to ban the p...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • An Ecology of World Literature

    An Ecology of World Literature

    by Alexander Beecroft

    What is a literature? How do literatures of different countries interact with each other? In this groundbreaking study, Alexander Beecroft develops a new way of thinking about world literature. Dra...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • Walter Benjamin

    Walter Benjamin

    by Terry Eagleton

    This momentous study of Benjamin’s critical practice marks a sea change in Eagleton’s thought. Its goal is not merely to contemplate Benjamin’s approach to language, history, and art but to chart a...
    Paperback (2009)

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • Archaeologies of the Future

    Archaeologies of the Future

    by Fredric Jameson

    In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • The Task of the Critic

    The Task of the Critic

    by Terry Eagleton

    Edited by Matthew Beaumont

    Terry Eagleton occupies a unique position in the English-speaking world today. He is not only a productive literary theorist, but also a novelist and playwright. He remains a committed socialist de...
    Paperback

    We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

  • Nightwalking

    Nightwalking

    by Matthew Beaumont

    Afterword by Will Self

    Foreword by Will Self

    In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Matthew Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: the fetid, treacherous streets known to Chaucer and...
  • One-Way Street

    One-Way Street

    by Walter Benjamin

    Introduction by Susan Sontag

    Translated by Edmund F.N. Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter

    Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who made an enormous impact with his critical and philosophical writings...

Book strip #11

Book strip #12

Book strip #13

Book strip #14

Book strip #15

Book strip #16

Book strip #17

Book strip #18

Book strip #19

Book strip #20

Book strip #21

Book strip #22

Filed under: student-reading, versoreadinglists