The first comprehensive study in English of Umberto Eco's theories and fictions.

1. Umberto Eco's intellectual origins: medieval aesthetics, publishing and mass media; 2. The open work, misreadings, and modernist aesthetics; 3. Cultural theory and popular culture: from structuralism to semiotics; 4. From semiotics to narrative theory in a decade of radical social change; 5. 'To make truth laugh': postmodern theory and practice in The Name of the Rose; 6. Interpretation, overinterpretation, paranoid interpretation, and Foucault's Pendulum; 7. Inferential strolls and narrative shipwrecks: Six Walks and The Island of the Day Before; 8. Conclusion; Bibliography.