本书是由乔国强教授任主编，多位学者参与编写的一本西方文论教材。编辑这本教材的主要目的，是为高校本科生和研究生提供一本能够较为全面地了解和把握20世纪西方文论部分主要文献的读本。这部教材在编写体例上采用中英两种文字:评介部分用中文，由本书编者撰写;文献部分则选用英文原作并作注释。
采用这种编写体例主要是想为学生提供一些背景知识，帮助解决一些阅读中的困难，较好地理解所选文论的原文。
本书采用了中英文两种语言来编写，即批评文本用英文，导读则用中文。这样读者既可通过文本感受到原文的魅力，同时又能在对照中更好地理解原文以及该理论流派的主旨和走向。本书分上下两册。上册中收录的文论主要是论述诗歌、小说和戏剧的；下册主要是有关方法论的文章。本书既然是以“二十世纪西方文论选读”来命名，就必然要顾及“面”的普及性，因此所选取的文章在时间上几乎横跨了一个世纪。西方马克思主义在20世纪的文学理论界占有重要的一席，也作了适量的收录。

上册
　编者的话
　导言
　第一编 诗歌
　　W.B.Yeats: The Symbolism of Poetry
Ezra Pound: A Retrospect
T.S.Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent
Paul Valry: Poetry and Abstract Thought: Dancing and Walking
Yvor Winters: Preliminary Problems
Northrop Frye: Literature as Context: Milton s Lycidas
　第二编 小说
Henry James: Preface to The Ambassadors
Virginia Woolf: Modern Fiction
D.H.Lawrence:Morality and the Novel
Why the Novel Matters
Jean-Paul Sartre:Why Write ?
Georg Luckacs: The Ideology of Modernism
Wayne Booth: “Objectivity” in Fiction
　第三编 戏剧
G.Wilson Knight:Macbeth and the Metaphysic of Evil
L.C.Knights: Restoration Comedy: The Reality and the Myth
Francis Fergusson: Oedipus Rex: The Tragic Rhythm of Action
Christopher Innes: Modernism in Drama
Raymond Williams: Modern Tragedy
Terry Eagleton: The Value of Agony
下册
　批评方法概览
T.S.Eliot: The Function of Criticism
Edmund Wilson: Marxism and Literature
Roland Barthes: Criticism as Language
Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation
Sara Blair: Modernism and the Politics of Culture
Marianne Dekoven: Modernism and Gender
Astradur Eysteinsson: The Making of Modernist Paradigms
Julia Kristeva: From One Identity to an Other
Steven Connor: Rewriting Wrong: On the Ethics of Literary Reversion
Anne Balsamo: Feminism for the Incurably Informed
Ralph Cohen: Do Postmodern Genres Exist?
John Barth: The Literature of Exhaustion
Chinua Achebe: Colonialist Criticism
Kwame Anthony Appiah: The Postcolonial and the Postmodern
Partha Chatterjee: Nationalism as a Problem
David Lodge: Modernism， Antimodernism and Postmodernism