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Literary and Cultural Theory
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's combination of theory and practice 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.
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First published August 23, 2000
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About the author
Donald Hall
181 books201 followersDonald Hall was considered one of the major American poets of his generation.
His poetry explores the longing for a more bucolic past and reflects the poet’s abiding reverence for nature. Although Hall gained early success with his first collection, Exiles and Marriages (1955), his later poetry is generally regarded as the best of his career. Often compared favorably with such writers as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall used simple, direct language to evoke surrealistic imagery. In addition to his poetry, Hall built a respected body of prose that includes essays, short fiction, plays, and children’s books. Hall, who lived on the New Hampshire farm he visited in summers as a boy, was also noted for the anthologies he has edited and is a popular teacher, speaker, and reader of his own poems.
Born in 1928, Hall grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. The Hall household was marked by a volatile father and a mother who was “steadier, maybe with more access to depths because there was less continual surface,” as Hall explained in an essay for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS). “To her I owe my fires, to my father my tears. I owe them both for their reading.” By age twelve, Hall had discovered the poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe: “I read Poe and my life changed,” he remarked in CAAS. Another strong influence in Hall’s early years was his maternal great-grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire, where he spent many summers. Decades later, he bought the same farm and settled there as a full-time writer and poet.
Hall attended Philips Exeter Academy and had his first poem published at age 16. He was a participant at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, where he met Robert Frost, that same year. From Exeter, Hall went to Harvard University, attending class alongside Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery; he also studied for a year with Archibald MacLeish. Hall earned a BLitt from Oxford University and won the Newdigate contest for his poem “Exile,” one of the few Americans ever to win the prize. Returning to the United States, Hall spent a year at Stanford, studying under the poet-critic Yvor Winters, before returning to Harvard to join the prestigious Society of Fellows. It was there that Hall assembled Exiles and Marriages, a tightly-structured collection crafted in rigid rhyme and meter. In 1953, Hall also became the poetry editor of the Paris Review, a position he held until 1961. In 1957 he took a position as assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he remained until 1975. While at Michigan, Hall met the young Jane Kenyon. They later married and, when Hall’s grandmother, who owned Eagle Pond Farm, passed away, bought the farm, left teaching, and moved there together. The collections Kicking the Leaves (1978) and The Happy Man (1986) reflect Hall’s happiness at his return to the family farm, a place rich with memories and links to his past. Many of the poems explore and celebrate the continuity between generations. The Happy Man won the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize. Hall’s next book, The One Day (1988), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. A long poem that meditates on the on-set of old age, The One Day, like much of Hall’s early work, takes shape under formal pressure: composed of 110 stanzas, split over three sections, its final sections are written in blank verse. The critic Frederick Pollack praised the book as possibly “the last masterpiece of American Modernism. Any poet who seeks to surpass this genre should study it; any reader who has lost interest in contemporary poetry should read it.” Old and New Poems (1990) contains several traditional poems from earlier collections, as well as more innovative verses not previously published. “Baseball,” included in The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993), is the poet’s ode to the great American pastime and is structured around t
His poetry explores the longing for a more bucolic past and reflects the poet’s abiding reverence for nature. Although Hall gained early success with his first collection, Exiles and Marriages (1955), his later poetry is generally regarded as the best of his career. Often compared favorably with such writers as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall used simple, direct language to evoke surrealistic imagery. In addition to his poetry, Hall built a respected body of prose that includes essays, short fiction, plays, and children’s books. Hall, who lived on the New Hampshire farm he visited in summers as a boy, was also noted for the anthologies he has edited and is a popular teacher, speaker, and reader of his own poems.
Born in 1928, Hall grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. The Hall household was marked by a volatile father and a mother who was “steadier, maybe with more access to depths because there was less continual surface,” as Hall explained in an essay for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS). “To her I owe my fires, to my father my tears. I owe them both for their reading.” By age twelve, Hall had discovered the poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe: “I read Poe and my life changed,” he remarked in CAAS. Another strong influence in Hall’s early years was his maternal great-grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire, where he spent many summers. Decades later, he bought the same farm and settled there as a full-time writer and poet.
Hall attended Philips Exeter Academy and had his first poem published at age 16. He was a participant at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, where he met Robert Frost, that same year. From Exeter, Hall went to Harvard University, attending class alongside Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery; he also studied for a year with Archibald MacLeish. Hall earned a BLitt from Oxford University and won the Newdigate contest for his poem “Exile,” one of the few Americans ever to win the prize. Returning to the United States, Hall spent a year at Stanford, studying under the poet-critic Yvor Winters, before returning to Harvard to join the prestigious Society of Fellows. It was there that Hall assembled Exiles and Marriages, a tightly-structured collection crafted in rigid rhyme and meter. In 1953, Hall also became the poetry editor of the Paris Review, a position he held until 1961. In 1957 he took a position as assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he remained until 1975. While at Michigan, Hall met the young Jane Kenyon. They later married and, when Hall’s grandmother, who owned Eagle Pond Farm, passed away, bought the farm, left teaching, and moved there together. The collections Kicking the Leaves (1978) and The Happy Man (1986) reflect Hall’s happiness at his return to the family farm, a place rich with memories and links to his past. Many of the poems explore and celebrate the continuity between generations. The Happy Man won the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize. Hall’s next book, The One Day (1988), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. A long poem that meditates on the on-set of old age, The One Day, like much of Hall’s early work, takes shape under formal pressure: composed of 110 stanzas, split over three sections, its final sections are written in blank verse. The critic Frederick Pollack praised the book as possibly “the last masterpiece of American Modernism. Any poet who seeks to surpass this genre should study it; any reader who has lost interest in contemporary poetry should read it.” Old and New Poems (1990) contains several traditional poems from earlier collections, as well as more innovative verses not previously published. “Baseball,” included in The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993), is the poet’s ode to the great American pastime and is structured around t
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 5, 2013
This little book saved my life countless times in my academic career. I got it for an Intro to English Studies class my sophomore year in college. The different theories are laid out very clearly with example essays accompanying each section. I would never sell it back!
November 26, 2023
How do you review a book about book reviews without falling off the impartial perch of the reviewer and onto the subjective couch of the student? I’ll try.
This book, intended for academics, provides ten methodologies according to which one could review a book, with the caveat that these methodologies only provide an angle of view and not the whole picture. Each methodology is presented by an overview, its key principles, a bibliography to support the methodology, a review of a well-known book written by a reviewer who has chosen to apply that particular methodology, and concluding with a critique on the review by the author Donald E. Hall.
The methodologies range from the textual to the reader-response driven, from the material to the psychoanalytical, from the structural to the post-structural, from gender to sexual, from race to post-colonial, and also includes a pluralistic methodology that combines multiple individual methodologies previously discussed. In the last methodology, there is recognition that traditional cultural forms of poetry, drama, novels, and essays are being supplemented with newer forms such as journalism and news reportage, letters, diaries, popular songs, fashion, film, advertising and television. Before embarking on a review, it is therefore advisable to choose the methodology that most appropriately matches the core points you want to unearth.
That said, some great writers and their work are reviewed here: Wordsworth’s “Intimations,” Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Melville’s Billy Budd, a comparison of Marlow to Shakespeare with emphasis on Romeo & Juliet, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Dickens’s Great Expectations. A review of advertising under the methodology of Structuralism and Semiotics also indicates how much the symbols of advertising have influenced our cultural evolution.
The reviews themselves are quite long, in excess of twenty pages in some instances, and I wondered whether they served only the academic’s expansive desire for words with no concern for brevity in these attention-starved times. There is a great deal of repetition as the reviewer circles their point from many angles, despite having made it a long time ago: Mercutio and Romeo’s phallic dalliance is looked at from several vantage points wherever they occur in the play before concluding that these two young men did not act upon what was suggested in the text; the irony of Billy Budd’s innocence which leads him to violence vs. Cleggart’s treachery that attracts violence is referred to many times; the insistence that marriage is the key to survival of the failing aristocracy comes up at every plot twist in Pride and Prejudice. These central points echo with annoying consistency throughout each review. I’m not sure whether any of those reviews would make it into shorter-form review sites such as Goodreads or Amazon without radical surgery.
And yet this book gives us a view into the depth at which reviews of literature could (and should?) be undertaken. Far better to go deep than shallow, they seem to imply, and mine the depth of human experience and perception that have led to the present pass, rather than reduce book reviews to thinly veiled sales promo pieces that litter most review sites today. This book is certainly for the student of literature and not for the casual reader (or reviewer).
This book, intended for academics, provides ten methodologies according to which one could review a book, with the caveat that these methodologies only provide an angle of view and not the whole picture. Each methodology is presented by an overview, its key principles, a bibliography to support the methodology, a review of a well-known book written by a reviewer who has chosen to apply that particular methodology, and concluding with a critique on the review by the author Donald E. Hall.
The methodologies range from the textual to the reader-response driven, from the material to the psychoanalytical, from the structural to the post-structural, from gender to sexual, from race to post-colonial, and also includes a pluralistic methodology that combines multiple individual methodologies previously discussed. In the last methodology, there is recognition that traditional cultural forms of poetry, drama, novels, and essays are being supplemented with newer forms such as journalism and news reportage, letters, diaries, popular songs, fashion, film, advertising and television. Before embarking on a review, it is therefore advisable to choose the methodology that most appropriately matches the core points you want to unearth.
That said, some great writers and their work are reviewed here: Wordsworth’s “Intimations,” Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Melville’s Billy Budd, a comparison of Marlow to Shakespeare with emphasis on Romeo & Juliet, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Dickens’s Great Expectations. A review of advertising under the methodology of Structuralism and Semiotics also indicates how much the symbols of advertising have influenced our cultural evolution.
The reviews themselves are quite long, in excess of twenty pages in some instances, and I wondered whether they served only the academic’s expansive desire for words with no concern for brevity in these attention-starved times. There is a great deal of repetition as the reviewer circles their point from many angles, despite having made it a long time ago: Mercutio and Romeo’s phallic dalliance is looked at from several vantage points wherever they occur in the play before concluding that these two young men did not act upon what was suggested in the text; the irony of Billy Budd’s innocence which leads him to violence vs. Cleggart’s treachery that attracts violence is referred to many times; the insistence that marriage is the key to survival of the failing aristocracy comes up at every plot twist in Pride and Prejudice. These central points echo with annoying consistency throughout each review. I’m not sure whether any of those reviews would make it into shorter-form review sites such as Goodreads or Amazon without radical surgery.
And yet this book gives us a view into the depth at which reviews of literature could (and should?) be undertaken. Far better to go deep than shallow, they seem to imply, and mine the depth of human experience and perception that have led to the present pass, rather than reduce book reviews to thinly veiled sales promo pieces that litter most review sites today. This book is certainly for the student of literature and not for the casual reader (or reviewer).
May 15, 2014
Practical and helpful for literary theory students.
February 5, 2016
Booooorrrrrrrrrring. I read this as an undergraduate, so maybe I would have a different opinion if I read it now, but my instincts tell me I wouldn't.
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February 28, 2011there is no transcendental signified
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews