The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 2e

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Some of the strengths of this work are that it is organized in such a way that it is easy to find a work on a particular theory or by a specific author. In a life full of reading books, there are few books that have given me so much satisfaction to be done with. It was necessary to break the cardinal rule against defacing texts, since I need little notes to jog my memory and make chains of connection while I'm reading. As an anthology it does a good job and is helpful for those who don't necessarily want to read it all.

Toss away any notions of easy reading and delve into the introductions of most of the main theoretical arguments beginning with Plato and rounding out with "Theory is dead" criticism. This is a monstrous anthology; it was used as the primary textbook for my Critical Theory and Literary Criticism course (ENGL 602 at University of Maryland). She was also the translator of Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination (U of Chicago P) and Stéphane Mallarmé’s Divagations (Harvard UP/Belknap Press). A prominent medievalist and feminist critic, Professor Finke is the author of Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Johns Hopkins UP), King Arthur and the Myth of History (University Press of Florida), Feminist Theory, Women's Writing (Cornell UP) and Women's Writing in English: The Middle Ages (Longman) and the editor of Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers (Cornell UP).Denean Sharpley-Whiting, the award-winning Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. While the introductions to the theorists and philosophers are concise and clear enough, the book becomes more and more anglo, and americo, centric as it approaches the end of the 20th century, in a truly disgusting way. I loved the diversity in their choice of authors (still way to go but it is an important step towards more inclusivity). But from what I did read I liked Postcolonialism the best and I really liked reading Freud's essays.

I grabbed this highly regarded anthology hoping to discover or brush up on rewarding ways of thinking about literature. I got this for only 20 bucks and over the course of a year and a half I got much more than my money's worth out of it. I especially enjoyed the psychoanalytic theorists (especially Jacques Lacan), felt as though my discarded feelings regarding women's rights and responsibilities were revived with feminist critique (espcially my beloved Simone de Beauvoir -- I actually cried reading the Second Sex). This anthology does a good job of providing salient works by a wide variety of authors on the various theories of literary criticism. A book that has served me well for my English undergraduate degree; a great wealth and variety of philosophers' and theorists' seminal texts along with biographical information and explanation of major themes.T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is Professor of French, Professor and Director of African American and Diaspora Studies, and Director of the W. This is one of the most useful/favorite books in my library, which is to say that the (bible-thin) pages are wrinkled and dirty from my fingertips paging over them--and that's saying quite a lot, since I take ridiculously good care of my books. The Norton isn't inventing this trend, which has been around for awhile; but it isn't resisting it either. For autographs of eBook versions of The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence or Bricktop's Paris, please go to Authorgraph.