Literary Theories

A Case Study in Critical Performance

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Edited by Julian Wolfreys and William Baker,

by Richard Jefferies

New York University Press

Due/Published November 1996, 256 pages, paper

ISBN 0814712932

Every student of literature needs to understand how to use literary theory to analyze and interpret the text. In Literary Theories Julian Wolfreys and William Baker challenge the outdated notion that theory is something separable from the act of reading itself. Maintaining that the best way to learn is through practical application, the editors have assembled a volume of essays that plunges the student into the midst of a range of critical readings. Each essay in the book explores a previously unpublished short story by Richard Jefferies, also included in the volume, from a different theoretical perspective, thereby presenting students with New Historicist, Marxist, feminist, structuralist, post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, and Derridean methods of analysis and interpretation. Cogently argued and lucidly written, these essays offer the student reader an interactive introduction to the ways in which contemporary literary theories challenge us to rethink the acts of reading, writing, and interpretation.