Synopsis This book attempts to see through the definitions, judgments and the characteristic features of the literary theories and the critical schools of literature, offering special emphasis on the concepts of beauty, aesthetics, modernism, postmodernism, structuralism, meta-narrative, semiotics, deconstruction and on the philosophical psyche of criticism itself that have swept the critical consciousness of the 20 century. The work is patterned in to be elaborate and explicit enough so as to reach both the target readers-students, research scholars, teachers and the readers in general, not frequenters to this discipline.