This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the work and thought of Umberto Eco - one of the most important writers in Europe today. While Eco became world-famous with his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, his writings have been influential in many fields for several decades. Caesar retraces the development of Eco's thought and its impact on literary studies, aesthetics, philosophy and semiotics. He shows how, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Eco elaborated his theory of art, bringing together medieval aesthetics, the modernist avant-garde and his interest in the mass media. He discusses Eco's attempts to synthesize a general theory of signification and communication which would embrace both popular and mass culture - attempts which culminated in A Theory of Semiotics. Caesar also examines Eco's emergence as a novelist with the publication of The Name of the Rose in 1980 and the novels that followed it, and explores Eco's theories of reading and interpretation which take shape between The Role of the Reader and Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. The book concludes with an analysis of the themes addressed in Eco's most recent work, Kant and the Platypus. Wide-ranging and up to date, this engaging study will appeal to students of literature, philosophy and cultural studies, and to anyone who wants a clear introduction to one of Europe's most stimulating and original intellectuals.