Do the various forms of literary theory - deconstruction, Marxism, new historicism, feminism, post-colonialism, and cultural/digital studies - have anything in common? If so, what are the fundamental principles of theory? What is its ideological orientation? Can it still be of use to us in understanding basic intellectual and ethical dilemmas of our time? These questions continue to perplex both students and teachers of literary theory. Habib finds the answers in theory's largely unacknowledged roots in the thought of German philosopher Hegel. Hegel's insights continue to frame the very terms of theory to this day. Habib explains Hegel's complex ideas and how they have percolated through the intellectual history of the last century. This book will interest teachers and students of literature, literary theory and the history of ideas, illuminating how our modern world came into being, and how we can better understand the salient issues of our own time.

‘This is a wonderful and magisterial study which covers a vast range of philosophical material, both ancient and modern, and does so with enormous erudition, precision, force and clarity … brilliantly expounded via wonderfully complex readings and argumentation. What the study thus achieves is nothing less than a complete re-visioning of modern literary theory …'

John Schad - Lancaster University

‘M. A. R. Habib proposes in this immensely important and lucidly argued book Hegel's dialectical method as foundational for our moral and social conscience and as an indispensable critical tool for assessment of the deficiencies of modernity. The book presents Hegel's dialectics as a form of subversive thinking that anticipates contemporary literary theory by establishing identity as a process rather than as an essence, thus enabling a critique of the internal contradictions both of bourgeois thought and capitalist ideology. Hegel and the Foundations of Literary Theory is wonderfully readable. It elucidates both contemporary theory and Hegel's philosophy, and it is entirely convincing in its claim that liberal humanism is unthinkable without Hegel.'

Harold Schweizer - Bucknell University, Pennsylvania