Michael Payne introduces the principal writings of Roland Barthes, Michael Foucault and Louis Althusser by means of a detailed focus on their common interest in the forms and conditions of knowledge.

Michael Payne is John P. Corzer Professor of English at Bucknell University. He is editor of Blackwell's Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory (1996) and general editor of the Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory, also published by Blackwell. His Reading French Feminism is forthcoming, as is his Renaissance Literature: An Anthology, in the Blackwell Anthologies series.