Classical Theory and Criticism（古典文论）
- Gorgias of Leontin (ca. 483-376 BCE）
- Plato (ca. 427-ca. 347 BCE)
- Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
- Horace (65-8 BCE)
- Longinus (1st century CE)
- Quintilian (ca. 30/35-ca. 100)
- Plotinus (ca. 204/5-270)
Medieval Theory and Criticism（中世纪文论）
- Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
- Macrobius (b. ca. 360)
- Hugh of St. Victor (ca.1097-1141)
- Moses Maimonides (1135-1204)
- Geoffrey of Vinsauf (ca. 1200)
- Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
- Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
Renaissance Theory and Criticism（文艺复兴文论）
- Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)
- Christine de Pizan (ca. 1365-ca. 1429)
- Martin Luther (1483-1546)
- Giambattista Giraldi (1504-1573)
- John Calvin (1509-1564)
- Joachim du Bellay (ca, 1522-1560)
- Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585)
- Giacopo Mazzoni (1548-1598)
- Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
Enlightenment Theory and Criticism（启蒙时期文论）
- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
- René Descartes (1596-1650)
- Pierre Corneille (1606-1684)
- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
- John Dryden (1631-1700)
- John Locke (1632-1704)
- Aphra Behn (1640-1689)
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)
- Baruch Spinoza (1652-1677)
- Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)
- Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
- Edward Young (1683-1765)
- George Berkeley (1685-1753)
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
- David Hume (1711-1776)
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1805)
- Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)
Romantic Theory and Criticism（浪漫主义时期文论）
- Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
- Germaine Necker de Staël (1766-1817)
- Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
- William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
- Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866)
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Victorian Theory and Criticism（维多利亚时期文论）
- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
- Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
- Théophile Gautier (1811-1872)
- Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
- Karl Marx (1818-1883)
- Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)
- Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
- Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
- Franz Brentano (1838-1917)
- Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
- Walter Pater (1839-1894)
- Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)
- Henry James (1843-1916)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Modern and Contempoerary Theory and Criticism（现当代文论）
- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
- Edmund Husserl (1869-1938)
- Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
- W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963)
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
- Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)
- Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
- Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
- György Lukács (1885-1971)
- Boris Eichenbaum (1886-1959)
- T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
- John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
- Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
- Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
- Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
- Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
- Erich Auerbach (1892-1957)
- Roman Ingarden (1893-1970)
- Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984)
- Vladimir Propp (1895-1970)
- Edmund Wilson (1895-1972)
- Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
- Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895-1975)
- F. R. Leavis (1895-1978)
- Roman Jakobson (1896-1982)
- Georges Bataille (1897-1962)
- Kenneth Burke (1897-1993)
- Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)
- Leo Strauss (1899-1973)
- Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)
- Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002)
- Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)
- Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991)
- Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
- Georges Poulet (1902-1991)
- Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969)
- René Wellek (1903-1995)
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
- Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995)
- Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
- Lionel Trilling (1906-1975)
- Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994)
- William K. Wimsatt Jr. (1907-1975)
- Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003)
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)
- Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
- Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)
- Mikel Dufrenne (1910-1995)
- J. L. Austin (1911-1960)
- Northrop Frye (1912-1991)
- Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005)
- Asger Jorn (1914-1973)
- Roland Barthes (1915-1980)
- Monroe C. Beardsley (1915-1985)
- Louis Althusser (1918-1990)
- Paul de Man (1919-1983)
- Irving Howe (1920-1993)
- Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997)
- Raymond Williams (1921-1988)
- John Rawls (1921-2002)
- E. P. Thompson (1924-1993)
- Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
- Michel de Certeau (1925-1986)
- Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995)
- Jean-François Lyotard (1925-1998)
- Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
- Wolfgang Iser (1926-2007)
- E. D. Hirsch Jr. (1928-)
- Seymour Chatman (1928-)
- Noam Chomsky (1928-)
- Hayden White (1929-2018)
- Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)
- Jürgen Habermas (1929-)
- Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)
- Félix Guattari (1930-1992)
- Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)
- Harold Bloom (1930-2019)
- Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)
- Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
- Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1930-2020)
- Guy Debord (1931-1994)
- Richard Ohmann (1931-2021)
- Henry Owuo-Anyumba (1932-1992)
- Stuart Hall (1932-2014)
- Umberto Eco (1932-2016)
- Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1932-)
- Luce Irigaray (1932-)
- Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
- Antonio Negri (1933-)
- Audre Lorde (1934-1992)
- Kate Millett (1934-2017)
- Fredric Jameson (1934-)
- Gerald Vizenor (1934-)
- Edward W. Said (1935-2003)
- Monique Wittig (1935-2003)
- Richard Lanham (1936-)
- Sandra M. Gilbert (1936-)
- Hélène Cixous (1937-)
- Gerald Graff (1937-)
- Stanley E. Fish (1938-)
- Nancy Armstrong (1938-)
- Nguigi wa Thiong’O (1938-)
- Pierre Macherey (1938-)
- John Fiske (1939-2021)
- Coppélia Huber Kahn (1939-)
- Taban lo Liyong (1939- )
- Tzvetan Todorov (1939-)
- Paula Gunn Allen (1939-)
- Jane Tompkins (1940-)
- Alan Sinfield (1941-2017)
- Annette Kolodny (1941-2019)
- Julia Kristeva (1941-)
- Laura Mulvey (1941-)
- Giorgio Agamben (1942-)
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942-)
- Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004)
- Bessel van der Kolk (1943-)
- Houston A. Baker Jr. (1943-)
- Terry Eagleton (1943-)
- Stephen Greenblatt (1943-)
- Barbara Christian (1943-2000)
- Jonathan Culler (1944-)
- Nancy Chodorow (1944-)
- Susan Gubar (1944-)
- Donna Haraway (1944-)
- Barbara Smith (1946-)
- Barbara Johnson (1947-2009)
- Bonnie Zimmerman (1947-)
- Susan Bordo (1947-)
- John Frow (1948-)
- Walter Benn Michaels (1948-)
- Gayle Rubin (1949-)
- Homi K. Bhabha (1949-)
- Jamaica Kincaid (1949-)
- Lennard J. Davis (1949-)
- Slavoj Žižek (1949-)
- Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1950-)
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-)
- Louis Montrose (1950-)
- Shelley Fisher Fishkin (1950-)
- Dick Hebdige (1951-)
- Steven Knapp (1951-)
- bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins, 1952-2021)
- Eric Sundquist (1952-)
- Anne McClintock (1955-)
- Judith Butler (1956-)
- Stuart Moulthrop (1957-)
- Geraldine Heng (1960-)
- Lisa Lowe (1961-)
- Judith Halberstam (Jack Halberstam, 1961-)
- Michael Moon (1969-)
- Adam Krims (1970-)