This is a list of important and seminal works in the field of critical theory.

• Otto Maria Carpeaux
  • História da Literatura Ocidental, 8 vol. (Portuguese, 1959–66)
• M. H. Abrams
  • The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
• Angela Davis
  • Women, Race, and Class
  • Are Prisons Obsolete?
• Theodor Adorno
  • Aesthetic Theory
  • Negative Dialectics
• Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer
  • Dialectic of Enlightenment
• Louis Althusser
  • For Marx
  • Lenin and Philosophy
• Erich Auerbach
  • Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
• Mikhail Bakhtin
  • Discourse in the Novel
  • Rabelais and his World
• Roland Barthes
  • Image, Music, Text
  • Mkk
• Jean Baudrillard
  • The Perfect Crime
  • Simulation and Simulacra
• Walter Benjamin
  • Illuminations
  • The Origin of German Tragic Drama
• Homi K. Bhabha
  • The Location of Culture
• Pierre Bourdieu
  • La distinction
• Kenneth Burke
  • A Rhetoric of Motives
  • A Grammar of Motives
• John Brannigan
  • New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
• Cleanth Brooks
  • The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry
• Sean Burke
  • The Death and Return of the Author
• Judith Butler
  • Bodies That Matter
  • Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
• Cathy Caruth
  • Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • Biographia Literaria
• Jonathan Culler
  • Structuralist Poetics
  • The Pursuit of Signs
  • Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
• Gilles Deleuze
  • Difference and Repetition
• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
  • Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (pt.1) and A Thousand Plateaus (pt.2)
• Jacques Derrida
  • Of Grammatology
  • Writing and Difference
• Peter Dews
  • The Limits of Disenchantment
  • The Logic of Disintigration
• Terry Eagleton
  • Marxism and Literary Criticism
  • The Idea of Culture
• Antony Easthope
  • The Unconscious
• William Empson
  • Seven Types of Ambiguity
  • Some Versions of Pastoral
  • The Structure of Complex Words
• Norman Fairclough
  • Language and Power
  • Critical Discourse Analysis
• Frantz Fanon
  • Black Skins, White Masks
• Stanley Fish
  • Is There a Text in this Class?
• Northrop Frye
  • Anatomy of Criticism
• Gerald Graff
  • Literature Against Itself
• Jürgen Habermas
  • Legitimation Crisis
  • The Theory of Communicative Action, volumes 1 & 2
  • The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
• Wolfgang Iser
  • The Act of Reading: a Theory of Aesthetic Response
• Leonard Jackson
  • The Poverty of Structuralism
• Fredric Jameson
  • The Political Unconscious
  • Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
  • The Prison-House of Language
• Frank Kermode
  • Romantic Image
• Julia Kristeva
  • Desire in Language
  • Powers of Horror
• Jacques Lacan
  • Ecrits
  • The Seminars
• F.R. Leavis
  • The Great Tradition
• Ania Loomba
  • Colonialism/Postcolonialism
• Herbert Marcuse
  • Reason and Revolution. Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory
  • Eros and Civilization
  • Soviet Marxism. A Critical Analysis
  • One-Dimensional Man
• Toril Moi
  • Sexual/Textual Politics
• I.A. Richards
  • Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement
  • Principles of Literary Criticism
• K.K. Ruthven
  • Critical Assumptions
• Edward Said
  • Culture and Imperialism
  • Orientalism (1978)
• Jean-Paul Sartre
  • What Is Literature? (1947)
• Ferdinand de Saussure
  • Cours de linguistique générale (posthumously 1916)
• Alfred Schmidt
  • The Concept of Nature in Marx (1962)
  • Zur Idee der Kritischen Theorie (German, 1974)
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
  • Between Men
  • Epistemology of the Closet
• Susan Sontag
  • Against Interpretation
  • Styles of Radical Will
  • Under the Sign of Saturn
  • Where The Stress Falls
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
  • "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
  • In Other Worlds
• Raymond Tallis
  • Not Saussure
• Scott Wilson
  • Cultural Materialism
• W.K. Wimsatt
  • The Verbal Icon
• Virginia Woolf
  • A Room of One's Own
• Slavoj Žižek
  • The Sublime Object of Ideology
  • The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology