This text gathers together interpretations of Beckett's best-known plays, illustrating a range of theoretical approaches from deconstruction to reader-response theory, psychoanalysis and feminism. Included, as well, is an introduction by Steven Connor, assessing the mutual relations between Beckett's work and contemporary literary theory. There are also introductory notes to the essays. The essays are contibuted by: Mary Bryden, James Calderwood, Steven Connor, Jane Hale, Sylvie Henning, Wolfgang Iser, Andrew Kennedy, Paul Lawley, Jeffrey Nealon, Judith Roof, and Gabriele Schwab. Steven...

Over the last few decades, literary criticism has come increasingly to consider its relation to politics, socio-economics, gender, psychoanalysis, language and cultural values. Chaucer's most popular and widely-studied work, The Canterbury Tales, boasts a body of criticism which well reflects the diversity of scholarly readings, from the New Critical to the postmodern. The essays gathered here offer the student some of the best and most provocative readings of the Tales as well as a wide range of critical approaches. The editors' introduction outlines these developing schools of Chaucerian...

The new critical approaches that have swept through literary criticism in recent years have transformed our sense of David Copperfield and Hard Times. There is now a new kind of understanding of how both novels emerge from and relate to the 1850's. In collecting together the most original and exciting, innovative work on David Copperfield and Hard Times, this New Casebook offers the reader an excellent and unique introduction to current critical thinking about Dickens.

This New Casebook contains ten essays written about Blake's poetry since 1970 selected to show the diversity of Blake criticism during the last twenty years and the ways in which contemporary critical theories open up new readings of his work. Essays representative of Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, feminist and new historicist criticism are included. David Punter's Introduction places these in the context of recent developments in critical theory and shows how today's student can best engage with Blake's complex and rewarding work.

This New Casebook includes some of the most incisive and searching critical explorations of poetry by Victorian women. Based on theoretical methods drawn from forms of feminist and historicist inquiry, it reveals how and why the powerful and often popular works of writers such as Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti have been subject to radical re-reading and re-valuation since the late 1970s. Furnished with a detailed introduction about women and poetic identity between 1830 and 1890, the volume includes an extensive bibliography suggesting further reading in what...

A new collection of modern essays on Lawrence's first major novel representative of both new and classic critical approaches. The essays - by leading critics such as Terry Eagleton, Kate Millett, Frank Kermode, John Goode and Paul Delany - explore a variety of ways of examining the novel including the psychoanalytic, feminist, marxist and formalist. The introduction sets these in the context of traditional ways of exploring the novel.

Middlemarch, by common consent one of the most important novels in English, has always stimulated outstanding criticism. Over the past twenty years or so, it has also become a favourite novel for consideration by critics wishing to develop and explore new ways of looking at the novel form. The excitement and originality of such criticism is reflected fully in this volume, which presents a whole range of current ways of looking at Middlemarch. The collection as a whole, along with a clear introduction and a guide to Further Reading, also provides a fascinating sense of how criticism of the...

After one hundred years, critical production on The Turn of the Screw shows no sign of abating. A long-standing controversy over the 'reality' or otherwise of the ghosts has given way to a general recognition of textual ambiguity, and recent developments in criticism, including Feminist, Materialist and Poststructuralist readings, have now brought out fundamental underlying issues of gender, class and sexuality. Also included in this volume are essays on What Maisie Knew; one of James's most lucid, yet aesthetically and morally complicated novels.

This volume presents a broad range of critical essays exemplifying different approaches to Shakespeare's two comedies, The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about Nothing. The essays approach the plays from a number of theoretical positions: feminist, historicist, deconstruction and psychoanalytic, as well as offering general commentary and a discussion of film versions and stage productions. The introduction explains the development of these critical pieces, making the two plays considered accessible to students at all levels.