Compact and portable, Critical Tradition: Shorter Edition presents major documents from Plato to today to help you learn literary theory and criticism.

David H. Richter (PhD, University of Chicago) is professor and director of graduate studies in the English Department at Queens College and professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Richter publishes in the fields of narrative theory and eighteenth-century literature. Recent titles include The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel (1996); Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century Literature (1999); and The Critical Tradition (Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998), and he is currently at work on two critical books: a cultural history of true crime fiction and an analysis of difficulty in biblical narrative.

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

Part One_____________________________________________________
CLASSIC TEXTS IN LITERARY CRITICISM
Plato
Republic, Book X

Ion
Aristotle
From Poetics
Horace
The Art of Poetry
Longinus
On the Sublime
Dante Alighieri
From Letter to Can Grande della Scala
Christine de Pisan
From La Querelle de la Rose
Sir Philip Sidney
An Apology for Poetry
Aphra Behn
An Epistle to the Reader from The Dutch Lover
Alexander Pope
An Essay on Criticism
Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, No. 4

Rasselas, Chapter 10

Immanuel Kant
From Critique of Judgment
Mary Wollstonecraft
From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
William Wordsworth
Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
From Biographia Literaria
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Defence of Poetry

Karl Marx

The Alienation of Labor from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Consciousness Derived from Material Conditions from The German Ideology
On Greek Art in Its Time from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Matthew Arnold
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
Friedrich Nietzsche
From The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music
Henry James
The Art of Fiction
Sigmund Freud
[Creative Writers and Daydreaming]
Medusa’s Head
T. S. Eliot
Tradition and the Individual Talent
Carl Gustav Jung
The Principal Archetypes
W. E. B. Du Bois
[On Double Consciousness] from The Souls of Black Folk
Criteria of Negro Art
Mikhail Bakhtin
The Topic of the Speaking Person from Discourse in the Novel
Heteroglossia in the Novel from Discourse in the Novel
From Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics
Virginia Woolf
[Shakespeares Sister] from A Room of One’s Own
[Austen – Brontë – Eliot] from A Room of One’s Own
[The Androgynous Vision] from A Room of One’s Own
Kenneth Burke
Literature as Equipment for Living
Simone de Beauvoir
Myths: Of Women in Five Authors
Susan Sontag
Against Interpretation

Part Two______________________________________________________
CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN LITERARY CRITICISM
1. Formalisms: Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelianism
Victor Shklovsky
Art as Technique
Vladimir Propp
[Fairy Tale Transformations]
Cleanth Brooks

Irony as a Principle of Structure
R. S. Crane
From The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks
W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley
The Intentional Fallacy

2. Structuralism and Deconstruction
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE
Nature of the Linguistic Sign

[Binary Oppositions]
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The Structural Study of Myth
Roland Barthes
From Work to Text
The Death of the Author
Michel Foucault
What Is an Author?
Jacques Derrida
Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences

3. Reader Response Theory
Hans Robert Jauss
[The Three Horizons for Reading] from Toward and Aesthetics of Reception
Wayne C. Booth
Control of Distance in Jane Austen’s Emma

Wolfgang Iser
The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach
Stanley Fish
How to Recognize a Poem When You See One
Judith Fetterley
Introduction to The Resisting Reader
Lisa Zunshine
Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness

4. Psychoanalytic Theory and Criticism
Jacques Lacan
The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience
The Meaning of the Phallus
Peter Brooks

Freuds Masterplot

Laura Mulvey
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Slavoj Žižek
Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing

5. Marxist Criticism
Walter Benjamin
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception from Dialectic of Enlightenment
Louis Althusser

From Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
Raymond Williams
From Marxism and Literature
Fredric Jameson
From The Political Unconscious

6. New Historicism and Cultural Studies
Hayden White
The Historical Text as Literary Artifact
Pierre Bourdieu
From Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
Stuart Hall
Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms
Nancy Armstrong
Some Call It Fiction: On the Politics of Domesticity
Stephen Greenblatt
Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance
King Lear and Harsnetts Devil-Fiction

John Guillory
From Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation

7. Feminist Criticism
Nina Baym
Melodramas of Beset Manhood
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
From Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship
Annette Kolodny
Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism
Julia Kristeva
Women’s Time
Barbara Smith
Toward a Black Feminist Criticism

8. Gender Studies and Queer Theory
Michel Foucault
From The History of Sexuality
Monique Wittig
One Is Not Born a Woman
Hélène Cixous
The Laugh of the Medusa
Gayle Rubin
From The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
From Between Men
From Epistemology of the Closet
Judith Butler
Imitation and Gender Insubordination

9. Postcolonialism and Ethnic Studies
Edward W. Said
From the Introduction to Orientalism
Benedict Anderson
The Origins of National Consciousness
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism
Gloria Anzaldua
La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness
Barbara Christian
The Race for Theory
Homi K. Bhabha
Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Writing, Race, and the Difference It Makes
Rey Chow
The Interruption of Referentiality: Poststructuralism and the Conundrum of Critical Multiculturalism

ALTERNATIVE CONTENTS

INDEX

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