Recommend a wonderful book: Contexts for Criticism

怀抱花朵的孩子

The forth edition of Contexts for Criticism


The third edition of Contexts for Criticism(I am reading this book)


I have just found the third edition of Contexts for Criticism in our university library, and I found this book is very wonderful.
Here are some information on this book(about the forth edition):

Overview:
The purpose of Contexts for Criticism is to help readers discover the fundamental issues of literary interpretation. The text includes three complete works: Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Melville's Benito Cereno, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.
These texts--plus Shakespeare's The Tempest--are examined through seven fundamental critical theories: Historical (Author as Context and Culture as Context), Formal, Reader-Response, Mimetic, Intertextual, and Poststructural

Feature Summary:
Three Complete Works: Contexts for Criticism includes the complete text of Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Melville's Benito Cereno, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.

Introductory Essays: Each chapter opens with an introductory essay that explains the assumptions and interests of the critics who work in a particular critical context, traces briefly the role the context has played in the history of criticism, and offers an assessment of its place in the contemporary scene.

Theoretical Essays: Two theoretical essays representing strong contemporary arguments for the critical theory appear in each chapter. The essays are written by well-known critics who are themselves committed to the approach.

Application Essays: Each chapter concludes with four essays applying some version of the critical approach to the same four texts: The Tempest, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Benito Cereno, and The Yellow Wallpaper. These widely studied works, representing different periods and genres, are rich enough to have inspired a variety of critical comment and short enough to be read and reread in conjunction with the critical essays.

Table of Contents:
I. HISTORICAL CRITICISM I: Author as Context

THEORY
E.D. Hirsch, Jr. Objective Interpretation
George Watson, Are Poems Historical Acts?


APPLICATIONS
Paul Yachnin, Shakespeare and the Idea of Obedience: Gonzalo in The Tempest
Allen C. Austin, Toward Resolving Keats’s Grecian Urn Ode
Sidney Kaplan, Herman Melville and the American National Sin: The Meaning of Benito Cereno
Denise D. Knight, The Yellow Wall-Paper

II. FORMAL CRITICISM: Poem as Context

THEORY
Cleanth Brooks, Irony as a Principle of Structure
John Ellis, The Relevant Context of a Literary Text


APPLICATIONS
Russ McDonald, Reading The Tempest
David A. Kent, On the Third Stanza of Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Bruce A. Bickley, The Method of Melville’s Short Fiction: "Benito Cereno"
Conrad Shumaker, "Too Terribly Good To Be Printed": Charlotte Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper"


III. READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM: Audience as Context

THEORY
Wolfgang Iser, Readers and the Concept of the Implied Reader
Norman Holland, The Miller’s Wife and the Professors


APPLICATIONS
Ole Martin Skilleas, Anachronistic Themes and Literary Value: The Tempest
Douglas B. Wilson, Reading the Urn: Death in Keats’s Arcadia
Catharine O’Connell, Narrative Collusion and Occlusion in Melville’s "Benito Cereno"
Annette Kolodny, A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts


IV. MIMETIC CRITICISM: Reality as Context


THEORY
Bernard Paris, The Uses of Psychology
Josephine Donovan, Beyond the Net: Feminist Criticism as a Moral Criticism


APPLICATIONS
Bernard Paris, The Tempest
Eva T.H. Brann, Pictures in Poetry: Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Allan Moore Emery, The Topicality of Depravity in "Benito Cereno"
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "The Yellow Wallpaper"


V. INTERTEXTUAL CRITICISM: Literature as Context


THEORY
Northrop Frye, The Critical Path
Jonathan Culler, Structuralism and Literature


APPLICATIONS
Northrop Frye, Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Lore Metzger, "Silence and Slow Time": Pastoral Topoi in Keats’s "Ode"
Charles Swann, Whodunnit? Or, Who Did What? Benito Cereno and the Politics of Narrative Structure
Jean Kennard, Convention Coverage or How to Read Your Own Life

VI. POSTSTRUCTURAL CRITICISM: Language as Context


THEORY
Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
Paul de Man, Semiology and Rhetoric


APPLICATIONS
Stephen J. Miko, Tempest
Barbara Jones Guetti, Resisting the Aesthetic
Elizabeth Wright, The New Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism
Richard Feldstein, Reader, Text, and Ambiguous Referentiality in "The Yellow WallPaper"


VII. HISTORICAL CRITICISM II: Culture as Context


THEORY
Terry Eagleton, Literature and History
Catherine Belsey, Literature, History, Politics
Stephen Greenblatt, Culture


APPLICATIONS
Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: the Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest
Marjorie Garson, Bodily Harm: Keats’s Figures in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Brook Thomas, The Legal Fictions of Herman Melville and Lemuel Shaw
Julie Bates Dock "But One Expects That": Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the Shifting Light of Scholarship


VIII. APPENDICES


"Ode on a Grecian Urn"
"Benito Cereno"
"The Yellow Wallpaper"

You can get more information here

[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2006-7-13 00:52 编辑 ]

怀抱花朵的孩子

I found this book in our university library, and it seems that we can't buy it in china, I've searched this book in amazom.com, but it is too expensive($68.44), I am afraid you can only borrow this book from some big library if you can find it.

You can get the aim and content of these editions from the Editorial Reviews of the third edition:

In this introduction to literary criticism, the major critical theories of literary interpretation—historical, formal, reader-response, mimetic, intertextual, poststructural, and new historical—are presented in separate chapters that include detailed introductions, “theoretical” essays that explain and argue the value of each theory, and “applications” essays in which the theories are applied to the same three literary works: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Wordsworth’s and Chopin’s works are included in the book.

As you can see each edition of this book is so different that we can take them as indipendent book and can get very great pleasure from each one. For example, the third edition contains three original text: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality. and the forth edition: Keats’ "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Melville's Benito Cereno, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. I will be very happy to find other editions of this book, but I am afraid that is only a dream.

[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2006-7-11 11:40 编辑 ]

nightele

searching all afternoon....... cant find it in zhejiang linrary....also the big book stores.........
good book bad luck..... wonder find it  some day.......

duessa

Looks like an interesting book, and I happened to have read all the three works in the fourth edition. But I don't think I could find it. What a pity!

怀抱花朵的孩子

Today when I was reading an article "Irony as a Principle of Structure" by Cleanth Brooks in Contexts for Criticism, I happened to have a thought that maybe I can't search this article on the interenet. after getting back home I found this article in a website, but it's posted in the form of PDF, so I can't paste it here. You can download it from:  http://www.neiu.edu/~edepartm/dep/profs/scherm/brooks.pdf

As what the preface of this article in Contexts for Criticism said "Cleanth Brooks has been one of the leading figures in Anglo-American formal criticism, and his essay "Irony as a Principle of Structure" illustrate several of the formalists' ideas."

You can search other articles by thier titles I've pasted above, it's a pity that I have only the third edition and the detailed title list of the forth edition. I hope I can search some of them, but I can't find titles of the first and the second edition.

[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2006-7-13 00:49 编辑 ]

怀抱花朵的孩子

You can get the article Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" from:
http://www.reeds.com.cn/viewthre ... a=page%3D1#pid38057
http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/sign-play.html