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Print Price: $84.99

Format:
Paperback, eBook
432 pp.

ISBN-13:
9780190855697

Copyright Year:
2020

Imprint: OUP US

How to Interpret Literature

Fourth Edition

Robert Dale Parker

Offering a refreshing combination of accessibility and intellectual rigor, How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies, Fourth Edition, presents an up-to-date, concise, and wide-ranging historicist survey of contemporary thinking in critical theory. The only book of its kind that thoroughly merges literary studies with cultural studies, this text provides a critical look at the major movements in literary studies from the 1930s to the present. It is the only up-to-date survey of literary theory that devotes extensive treatment to queer studies, postcolonial and race studies, environmental criticism, and disability studies. How to Interpret Literature is ideal as a stand-alone text or in conjunction with an anthology of primary readings, like Robert Dale Parker's Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies.

Readership : Students in Intro to Literary Criticism and Literary Theory courses.

Reviews

"Parker's text is a model of clarity and lucidity, and its accessible examples make even the most difficult theoretical concepts easy to grasp. How to Interpret Literature is compulsively readable--not just a page-turner--but even fun to read. My students found the book invaluable and have continued to use it as a reference in their other courses. There can be no higher recommendation than that."

--Jamie Goodrich, Wayne State University
"How to Interpret Literature is the best book available in the field. In addition to being accessible to people with little to no background in literary studies, it includes some newer approaches to literature--ecocriticism, disability studies, and queer of color critique--that many competing texts don't."

--Nowell Marshall, Rider University
"How to Interpret Literature offers well-informed, thorough, and incisive explanations of each theory."

--Anthony Grajeda, University of Central Florida

Preface
1. Introduction
2. New Criticism
Before New Criticism
How to Interpret: Key Concepts for New Critical Interpretation
Historicizing the New Criticism: Rethinking Literary Unity
The Intentional Fallacy and the Affective Fallacy
How to Interpret: A New Critical Example
The Influence of New Criticism
Further Reading
3. Structuralism
Key Concepts in Structuralism
How to Interpret: Structuralism in Cultural and Literary Studies
The Death of the Author
How to Interpret: The Detective Novel
Structuralism, Formalism, and Literary History
The Structuralist Study of Narrative: Narratology
How to Interpret: Focalization and Free Indirect Discourse
Narrative Syntax, and Metaphor and Metonymy
Further Reading
4. Deconstruction
Key Concepts in Deconstruction
How to Interpret: A Deconstructionist Example
Writing, Speech, and Différance
Deconstruction beyond Derrida
Deconstruction, Essentialism, and Identity
How to Interpret: Further Deconstructionist Examples
Further Reading
5. Psychoanalysis
Clinical Psychoanalysis
Key Concepts in Psychoanalysis: The Psychoanalytic Understanding of the Mind
Sigmund Freud
How to Interpret: Models of Psychoanalytic Interpretation
From the Interpretation of Dreams to the Interpretation of Literature
How to Interpret: Further Psychoanalytic Examples
Jacques Lacan
How to Interpret: A Lacanian Example
Further Reading
6. Feminism
What Is Feminism?
Early Feminist Criticism and Contemporary Feminist Criticism
Sex and Gender
Feminisms
How to Interpret: Feminist Examples
Feminism and Visual Pleasure
Intersectionality and the Interdisciplinary Ethos of Contemporary Feminism
Further Reading
7. Queer Studies
Key Concepts in Queer Studies
How to Interpret: A Queer Studies Example
Queer Studies and History
Outing: Writers, Characters, and the Literary Closet
How to Interpret: Outing the Closet
Homosociality and Homosexual Panic
Heteronormativity, the Anti-Social Turn, and Queer Time
Queer of Color Critique
How to Interpret: Another Queer Studies Example
Questions That Queer Studies Critics Ask
Further Reading
8. Marxism
Key Concepts in Marxism
Lukács, Gramsci, and Marxist Interpretations of Culture
Contemporary Marxism, Ideology, and Agency
How to Interpret: An Example from Popular Culture
Variations in Marxist Criticism
How to Interpret: Further Marxist Examples
Further Reading
9. Historicism and Cultural Studies
New Historicism
How to Interpret: Historicist Examples
Michel Foucault
Cultural Studies
How to Interpret: A Cultural Studies Example
Cultural Studies, Historicism, and Literature
Further Reading
10. Postcolonial and Race Studies
Postcolonialism
From Orientalism to Deconstruction: Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
How to Interpret: A Postcolonial Studies Example
Race Studies
How to Interpret: Postcolonial and Race Studies Examples
Postcolonial and Race Studies and Literary Studies
Further Reading
11. Reader Response
Ideal, Implied, and Actual Readers
Structuralist Models of Reading and Communication
Aesthetic Judgment, Interpretive Communities, and Resisting Readers
Reception Theory and Reception History
Paranoid, Suspicious, and Symptomatic Reading versus Surface Reading
Readers and the New Technologies
Further Reading
12. Recent and Emerging Developments: Environmental Criticism and Disability Studies
Environmental Criticism
Disability Studies
A Future for Critical Theory
Further Reading
Terms for Poetic Form
Works Cited
Photographic Credits
Index

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Robert Dale Parker is Frank Hodgins Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Making Sense - Margot Northey
How To Interpret Literature - Robert Dale Parker

Special Features
A conversational and engaging tone that speaks directly to today's students.
Wider coverage than any book of its kind.
A rich assortment of pedagogical features (charts, text boxes, photos, and suggestions for further reading).
New to this Edition
Updated conversation about contemporary movements, styles, and fields while trimming more dated and less relevant material.
An expanded discussion of topics such as: sex and gender, feminism as a western export, Mulvey's argument about visual pleasure, the "male gaze," bell hook's critique of Mulvey, hook's concept of the oppositional gaze, fourth-wave feminism, migration, racial labeling, racial appropriation, biopower, and the nonhuman.
Review of the evolving vocabulary around queer identities.
A concise glossary of terms for discussing poetic form.