This clear, succinct primer for literary theory provides students with a useful guide to contemporary theory and methodologies. Theoretical overviews summarize each literary approach for clarification and Application Essays by well-known scholars, on works by authors such as Shakespeare, Austen, Melville, Faulkner, and Angelou, represent the stated principles. The text helps students generate consistent, well-focused analyses based on any of ten critical methodologies, including New Criticism, Psychoanalytic Analysis, Deconstruction, Feminist Analysis, and New Historicism.
Synopsis
This clear, succinct primer for literary theory provides students with a useful guide to contemporary theory and methodologies. Theoretical overviews summarize each literary approach for clarification and Application Essays by well-known scholars, on works by authors such as Shakespeare, Austen, Melville, Faulkner, and Angelou, represent the stated principles. The text helps students generate consistent, well-focused analyses based on any of ten critical methodologies, including New Criticism, Psychoanalytic Analysis, Deconstruction, Feminist Analysis, and New Historicism.
About the Author, Donald E. Hall
Donald E. Hall (Ph.D., University of Maryland) is Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, where he received the university's Distinguished Teaching Award. He is the editor of Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age and the author of Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists, among other works.
"[T]his text is nearly uncanny in its ability to know what students do not know, how theories work and where they are based, what goes in undergraduate education, and how to bring this all together so that it really can work. Hall's text will be greeted with rejoicing (loud among teachers and undergrads, secretly but with no less enthusiasm by graduate students)."
