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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 801.95
EAN num: 9780415974103
ISBN number: 0415974100
Label: Routledge
Manufacturer: Routledge
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 488
Printing Date: August 14, 2006
Publishing house: Routledge
Sale Popularity Level: 10048
Studio: Routledge
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Product Description:
This new edition of the classic guide offers a thorough and accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory. It provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African-American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading. This book can be used as the only text in a course or as a precursor to the study of primary theoretical works. It motivates readers by showing them what critical theory can offer in terms of their practical understanding of literary texts and in terms of their personal understanding of themselves and the world in which they live. Both engaging and rigorous, it is a 'how-to' book for undergraduate and graduate students new to critical theory and for college professors who want to broaden their repertoire of critical approaches to literature.
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Rated by buyers 
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My hopes were high about this book, and I got somewhat disappointed. I think this book would be great for someone who is afraid or doesn't like literary theory though. The author has such a gentle and clear way to explain things. Sometimes she does get repetitive but I understand this is for the sake of a very didactic approach. However, if you like theory and you are not afraid of it, this intro may be too simplistic, even as an *intro*, and not that instigating. Among other things, I wish the author would give more in-depth explanations on lacanian theory, for example.
Rated by buyers -
Theory sucks. But this book is all right. I did actually enjoy the way she applied every theory to The Great Gatsby. It's good enough for a lit theory text book. One of the better ones I've seen, actually. But come on, lit theory? Yuck.
Rated by buyers -
Easy to read and understand. Well-written. An excellent idea. The views of this textbook, though are very skewed in favor of Marxism and Communism. This is not a balanced book.
Rated by buyers 
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Literary theory is one of the more challenging college courses even for graduate students. Typically, the instructor will assign a complex tome as the primary source and when that happens, the often bemused student needs a supplemental text. CRITICAL THEORY TODAY by Lois Tyson fills this void better than nearly every other choice. The problem with most critical theory books is that the authors assume that if the subject matter is heavy going in both matter and style, then any explanatory book must be similarly constructed. Lois Tyson stands out as one of a handful of writers who remembers to write very first as a student-friendly professor than a jargon-heavy theorist.
In her introduction, Tyson issues a stern warning that critical theory is an evolving and very nearly living and breathing field that involves a series of "overlapping, competing, quarrelling visions of the world rather than as tidy categories." (page 9) Tyson introduces each school of critical theory in roughly historical chronology, beginning with Psychoanalytic criticism, and following with Marxist, Feminist, New Critical, Reader-Response, Structuralist, Deconstructionist, New Historicist, Queer theory, African-American, and finishing with Post-Colonialist. In each case, Tyson provides an historical context, which leads into a close analysis of that particular school's underlying premises. Tyson "fleshes out" each school with a close reading of THE GREAT GATSBY, a novel which invites a spectrum of divergent analyses. She also includes a helpful list of questions that one might ask to connect that specific theory to a designated text. This list has potential for the interested student to practice writing his or her own analyses of standard literary works that invite interpretation under that critical lens.
There is a warning of my own that I wish to issue. There are a number of theories that are based on gender-race-class bases, all of which assume a basic hostility with and animus toward conventional Western-based attitudes of perceived patriarchy, economic dislocation, and victim ideology. Tyson is squarely in this camp of viewing pre-Deconstructionist literature as desperately needing to expose the hidden victims who, in her opinion, have been silenced by the stifling hand of that collective patriarchy. Still, despite this at times annoying bias, Tyson's text is solid and reliable and ought to occupy a space on the shelf of those who seek to use literature as a lens to shed light on why those who read a book or those who are in that book act the way they do.
Rated by buyers -
Lois Tyson's book is indeed a "user-friendly guide" which is especially helpful for teachers whose formal education pre-dates some of the critical theories which it addresses. By applying each interpretive strategy to one specific work, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Tyson makes the abstract concrete and demonstrates how readers may enrich their appreciation of works of literature.
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