A Beginner's Guide to Critical Reading : An Anthology of Literary Texts (Hardcover)

Introduction 1 Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’: sexual politics and metrical history 2 Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: framing the outsiders 3 Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: men reading and writing a woman 4 Shakespeare’s sonnets: courtly patronage and the homoerotic 5 Milton’s Paradise Lost: republican politics and the canon 6 Marvell, Winstanley, Milton: gardens, communes and losing Paradise 7 Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: colonialism and Eden lost again 8 Johnson and others: Toryism, the slave-trade, poverty, being and reading a character 9 Wordsworth’s poems of boyhood: myths of initiation in revolutionary times 10 Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: three-volume novels, centres and loss 11 Melville’s Bartleby: the crisis of interpretation 12 Dickinson’s poems: women writing the inexpressible 13 Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend: between men, education and law 14 Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books: remembering the love-gift 15 Wilde’s The Happy Prince: sex and politics in the fairy-tale 16 Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper: the woman’s body, hysteria, intertextuality 17 James’s The Turn of the Screw: desire in loss and the reader-response 18 Conrad’s The Secret Agent: journeying into political vision 19 Green’s Living: the working class in modernism and the search for the father 20 Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight: women in colonialism and framed in exhibition 21 Williams’s drama: realism in the theatre, policing the allowable on stage and in film 22 Hill’s ‘September Song’: the modern poet in history, the poem’s right to exist 23 Beckett’s Not I: challenging the audience with a life, lost 24 Bishop’s and Berryman’s poems: how to lose, and loss in this book.