First published in 2012. Michel Foucault was a different kind of intellectual from his predecessors, one whose work articulated a new relation both to the institutions in which he worked and to a wider public. By the end of his life, he held a prestigious chair at the Collège de France and his work was leaving its traces, more or less directly, on an extraordinarily wide range of academic research. This book offers an interpretation of Foucault's analysis of modern society and culture for students of literature. That is the purpose of its first seven chapters, which introduce his work in roughly chronological order.