Literary and Cultural Theory: From Basic Principles to Advanced Applications

by Donald E. Hall

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 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.

Genres: Literature, Literary Criticism

352 pages, Paperback

First published August 23, 2000

Reviews

[Hillary · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

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).

[Madalyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Practical and helpful for literary theory students.

[Kerri · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Andy]

there is no transcendental signified