《从柏拉图到巴特的文学理论》评价了自柏拉图到罗兰。巴特的重要文艺思潮发展阶段以及这些阶段中的重要思想家。内容包括理论家的著述提要，理论流派的划分和各个时期理论发展的情况等，简洁清晰地解释了七十余个术语。并通过一份长大6页的书单反映出近三十年来在文学理论研究领域所取得的重要成果，还结合当代文学研究的现状提出了不少令人深思的问题。

Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Literary Theory in Classical Times
Rhetorical Criticisam
Plato
Aristotle
Horace
Longinus
2 Literary Theory in the Middle Ages
Allegorical Exegesis
3 The Rise and Fall of Neoclassicism
The Question of Language
The Idealising Strain
The Italian Aristotelians
Neoclassicism and the Purification of language
French Neoclassical Theory
The British Version of Neoclassicism
British Theory in the Age of Sensibility
Vico,Diderot,Lessing
4 Romantic Literary Theory
Herder and the Spirit of the Time
The Influence of Kant
The Organic Principle
The Role of the Critic
Some British Themes
5 Social Theories of the 19th Century
Belinsky and the Three Radicals
Matthew Arnold
the Beginnings of Sociological Criticism:Taine and Marx
6 Naturalism, Symbolism and Modernism
French Naturalists
French Symbolists
……
7 New Developments in Theory
8 20th-Century Russian Theory
9 Anglo-American Criticism, 1900-60
10 Phenomenological Criticism in France and Germany
11 French Structuralism
Epilogue: Into the Postmodernist Period