Spurgeon examines the images of Shakespeare’s plays in order to find out what sorts of images he most frequently draws on and what this might tell us about him, especially in terms of his relation to his contemporaries. As this anecdote suggests, Frye’s influence on twentieth-century literary criticism was vast and distinguished, and he was writing at the peak of his powers when he penned this 1957 ‘anatomy’ of types of literature, adopting a structuralist approach to genre and form. The Paris Review Interviews, Vols. Influenced by Derrida but far more accessible, Royle’s readings are perhaps the best way to begin learning how to write ‘creative criticism’: criticism that reimagines what the literary-critical essay might look like, while still offering some wonderfully nuanced and sensitive close readings of the texts under discussion. Cook, who taught at the University of Toronto, collected some of her most important essays on a range of poets – including T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens – in this book in 1998. Not to be confused with the title of a Hilary Mantel novel, this ground-breaking study of Romanticism was published in 1953 and showed how, until the Romantics, art was seen to reflect the world (like a mirror), whereas the Romantics – and various writers and critics who have come along since – thought that art should illuminate the world (like a light). When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native … Gilbert and Gubar’s enjoyable and perceptive analysis of the various tropes, symbols, and images nineteenth-century female novelists employed in their work makes for a provocative and persuasive account of the ways in which women negotiated the patriarchal society about which, and in which, they wrote. Richards, whose lectures were hugely popular at Cambridge during the 1920s, gave his students a series of short poems with the authors and dates removed. ThoughtCo uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. Recommended edition: Against Coercion: Games Poets Play. Ranging from Shakespeare to Raymond Chandler, Royle reads canonical and non-canonical works of fiction, poetry, and drama through the lens of telepathy, exploring new ways of thinking about literary texts and the relationship between reader and author. Understanding and critiquing the books that line the bookshelves of the world's readers is no easy task. Deborah Appleman's book is a guide to teaching literary theory in the high school classroom. Recommended edition: In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic. Recommended edition: Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. Recommended edition: Seven Types of Ambiguity, Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. Richards’s work would influence American New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century – and his most famous pupil, William Empson… Recommended edition: Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment, William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity. Recommended edition: Telepathy and Literature by ROYLE (1990-11-29), Eleanor Cook, Against Coercion: Games Poets Play. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. Our editors independently research, test, and recommend the best products; you can learn more about our review process here. It is still in print – as an affordable Penguin Classics edition – and although Bradley sometimes treats the characters a little too much as though they were real people rather than imaginary constructions, there’s a raft of lucid insights into the plays to be had. Esther Lombardi, M.A., is a journalist who has covered books and literature for over twenty years. Recommended edition: Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition. Numerous masterpieces have been produced in the ‘genre’: here are a dozen of the most significant and notable works of literary criticism written in English. Jonathan Bate called Empson the funniest critic of the twentieth century. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth (New Penguin Shakespeare Library), Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Galaxy Books), In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literacy Imagination, Telepathy and Literature by ROYLE (1990-11-29). Stephen Fry has called it a sort of early version of what we’d now call digital fingerprinting, whereby digital analysis shows word frequencies and usage in Shakespeare’s work. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! It includes essays on various approaches, including reader-response and postmodern theory, along with an appendix of classroom activities for teachers. Among other things, Frye’s book makes you want to go away and read all of the famous works of poetry, drama, and fiction which he draws upon. Published in 1929, this book is as much the write-up to an educational experiment as it is a work of traditional literary criticism. Upon reading Ricks’s biography of Tennyson, W. H. Auden called Ricks ‘exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding’. This volume, edited by Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, is a comprehensive collection of feminist literary criticism. Using a range of critical approaches, Michael Ryan provides readings of famous texts such as Shakespeare's "King Lear" and Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye." Recommended edition: The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literacy Imagination, Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry. The rest of the book is devoted to the most influential schools of literary criticism, including psychological and feminist approaches. Some of the greatest minds in academia and literary criticism, as well as writers themselves, have attempted to define what makes good literature, or just what makes literature. But it’s this 1948 book, which made a case for the few authors Leavis thought worthy of admittance into the canon of the great English novel (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad), that is his most famous and representative work. Bringing together various … But the rise of English Literature as a university subject, at the beginning of the twentieth century, led to literary criticism focusing on English literature – everything from Shakespeare to contemporary literature – being taken seriously. This book, aimed at students, offers a simple overview of more traditional approaches to literary criticism, beginning with definitions of common literary elements like setting, plot, and character. This book is as much cultural theory as it is literary criticism, although it also contains some astute readings of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Yeats’s work, and Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Peter Barry's introduction to literary and cultural theory is a concise overview of analytical approaches, including relatively newer ones such as ecocriticism and cognitive poetics. When literary critics of some reputation taught at summer schools in the mid-twentieth century, they would often teach ‘the poetry course’ or ‘the Shakespeare course’.