For the last twenty-five years, Language, Discourse, Society has been the most intellectually challenging series in English. Its titles range across the disciplines from linguistics to biology, from literary criticism to law, combining vigorous scholarship and theoretical analysis at the service of a broad political engagement. This anniversary reader brings together a fascinating group of thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic with an introductory overview from the editors which considers the development of theory and scholarship over the past two decades.

Stephan Heath is a Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge.

Colin MacCabe is Distinguished Service Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh.

Denise Riley is Reader in the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.

Notes on Contributors * Introduction--S.Heath, C.MacCabe & D.Riley * James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word--C.MacCabe * On Law and Ideology--P.Q.Hirst * Language, Semiotics and Ideology--M.Pêcheux * The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction--J.Rose * The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry--D.Trotter * Understanding Beckett: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett--P.Gidal * Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero--B.Rotman * The Desire to Desire: The Women's Film of the 1940s--M.A.Doane * 'Am I That Name?': Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History--D.Riley * Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory--R.Tallis * The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune--K.Ross * Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands--P.Womack * Poetry and Narrative in Performance--D.Oliver * Visual and Other Pleasures--L.Mulvey * The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism--C.West * Poets on Writing: Britain, 1970-1991--D.Riley * The Crisis in Historical Materialism--S.Aronowitz * The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge--J.Barrell * On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality and Obscenity Law--I.Hunter, D.Saunders & D.Williamson * De-Hegemonizing Language Standards: Learning from (Post)Colonial Englishes about 'English'--A.Parakrama * Resources of Realism: Prospects for a 'Post-Analytic' Philosophy--C.Norris * The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernisms--L.Stonebridge * Death of Life: The Legacy of Molecular Biology--S.Shostak Pragmatics as Interpretation--J-J.Lecercle * Cities, Words and Images: From Poe to Scorsese--P.Lombardo * Series Bibliography