Speaking of Literature in the Twenty-first Century contains interviews with 12 distinguished and influential literary critics. The interviews - with Derek Attridge, Catherine Belsey, Rachel Bowlby, Jonathan Dollimore, J. Hillis Miller, Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Vicente L. Rafael, John Schad, Julian Wolfreys, Gayatri Spivak and Henry Louis Gates - offer both a professional and a personal perspective on many of the issues and questions facing students and academics today. Offering a lucid and friendly introduction to the work of these theorists, covering a variety of areas including feminism, post-structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism and translation studies, this book also addresses big questions such as "what is literature, after theory?" "What is the nature of literary criticism in the C21st?"