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"