Cover: The Critical Tradition: Shorter Edition, 3rd Edition by David H. Richter

The Critical Tradition: Shorter Edition

Third Edition ©2016 David H. Richter

This compact, portable edition of the bestselling anthology of literary criticism presents major documents from Plato to the present. Chronologically arranged, classic texts and a broad survey of contemporary theoretical movements combine with strong editorial support praised for its effectiveness i...
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ISBN:9781319011185

Cover: The Critical Tradition: Shorter Edition, 3rd Edition by David H. Richter

A shorter version of the “indispensable anthology for introducing a new generation of students” to literary criticism and theory.

This compact, portable edition of the bestselling anthology of literary criticism presents major documents from Plato to the present. Chronologically arranged, classic texts and a broad survey of contemporary theoretical movements combine with strong editorial support praised for its effectiveness in introducing students to these challenging readings.

For instructors seeking a text that is more affordable and compact than other chronologically comprehensive (hardback) anthologies, and more representative of the sweep of literary criticism than other paperback anthologies, The Critical Tradition, Shorter Third Edition, delivers. Students will appreciate having a smaller, less expensive text that facilitates their learning of literary theory and criticism.

Features

More portable and affordable than other volumes on the market, without sacrificing scope. With a third to a half of the selections found in comprehensive hardback competitors, the shorter Critical Tradition still offers an impressive range of more than 90 readings from Plato to the present—effectively the most frequently assigned selections in the canon of criticism. The text stands apart from similar offerings in paperback, as it represents the whole tradition of literary criticism and theory.

An indispensable selection of classic texts. Part One is a chronologically arranged anthology spanning classical times to the mid-twentieth century, with 38 diverse readings from Plato and Aristotle to Karl Marx, W.E.B. DuBois, Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag.

A wide-ranging survey of contemporary critical trends. Part Two includes 55 selections in 9 chapters that represent major critical movements from the twentieth century to the present, ranging from formalism and structuralism to gender studies and postcolonialism.

Thorough, balanced, and classroom-proven editorial matter. Widely praised for its evenhanded and accessible tone, the editorial apparatus includes:

  • A general introduction that surveys the history of criticism

  • Headnotes to each selection that provide biographical and contextual background

  • Chapter-opening essays that introduce contemporary critical schools and movements

  • Glosses that explain difficult terms, allusions, and concepts

New to This Edition

The Critical Tradition is an indispensable anthology for anyone who wishes to introduce a new generation of students to the continuing relevance of the questions posed by literary criticism and theory.
--Pericles Lewis, Yale University/Yale NUS College

Richter is gifted at distilling massive amounts of information into engaging and relevant summaries—he is a great storyteller as well as an impressive scholar.
--Lisa Schnell, University of Vermont

The book is amazingly thorough and excerpts very carefully when it does so. The introductions provide excellent overviews and the structure of the whole is effective.
--Ashley J. Cross, Manhattan College

First-rate: relevant, cogent, fair, and clear.
--David Halliburton, Stanford University

"The chapter introductions are superb. I don’t see much way to improve these, and they are one of the main reasons I use the text."
--James Perrin Warren, Washington and Lee University

Digital Options

Table of Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

Part One_____________________________________________________

CLASSIC TEXTS IN LITERARY CRITICISM

Plato

Republic, Book X

Ion

Aristotle

From Poetics

Horace

The Art of Poetry

Longinus

On the Sublime

Dante Alighieri

From Letter to Can Grande della Scala

Christine de Pisan

From La Querelle de la Rose

Sir Philip Sidney

An Apology for Poetry

Aphra Behn

An Epistle to the Reader from The Dutch Lover

Alexander Pope

An Essay on Criticism

Samuel Johnson

The Rambler, No. 4

Rasselas, Chapter 10

Immanuel Kant

From Critique of Judgment

Mary Wollstonecraft

From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

William Wordsworth

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

From Biographia Literaria

Percy Bysshe Shelley

A Defence of Poetry

Karl Marx

The Alienation of Labor from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Consciousness Derived from Material Conditions from The German Ideology

On Greek Art in Its Time from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Matthew Arnold

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time

Friedrich Nietzsche

From The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music

Henry James

The Art of Fiction

Sigmund Freud

[Creative Writers and Daydreaming]

Medusa’s Head

T. S. Eliot

Tradition and the Individual Talent

Carl Gustav Jung

The Principal Archetypes

W. E. B. Du Bois

[On Double Consciousness] from The Souls of Black Folk

Criteria of Negro Art

Mikhail Bakhtin

The Topic of the Speaking Person from Discourse in the Novel

Heteroglossia in the Novel from Discourse in the Novel

From Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics

Virginia Woolf

[Shakespeares Sister] from A Room of One’s Own

[Austen – Brontë – Eliot] from A Room of One’s Own

[The Androgynous Vision] from A Room of One’s Own

Kenneth Burke

Literature as Equipment for Living

Simone de Beauvoir

Myths: Of Women in Five Authors

Susan Sontag

Against Interpretation

　

Part Two______________________________________________________

CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN LITERARY CRITICISM

1. Formalisms: Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelianism

Victor Shklovsky

Art as Technique

Vladimir Propp

[Fairy Tale Transformations]

Cleanth Brooks

Irony as a Principle of Structure

R. S. Crane

From The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks

W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley

The Intentional Fallacy

　

2. Structuralism and Deconstruction

FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE

Nature of the Linguistic Sign

[Binary Oppositions]

Claude Lévi-Strauss

The Structural Study of Myth

Roland Barthes

From Work to Text

The Death of the Author

Michel Foucault

What Is an Author?

Jacques Derrida

Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences

3. Reader Response Theory

Hans Robert Jauss

[The Three Horizons for Reading] from Toward and Aesthetics of Reception

Wayne C. Booth

Control of Distance in Jane Austen’s Emma

Wolfgang Iser

The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach

Stanley Fish

How to Recognize a Poem When You See One

Judith Fetterley

Introduction to The Resisting Reader

Lisa Zunshine

Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness

　

4. Psychoanalytic Theory and Criticism

Jacques Lacan

The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience

The Meaning of the Phallus

Peter Brooks

Freuds Masterplot

Laura Mulvey

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Slavoj Žižek

Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing

　

5. Marxist Criticism

Walter Benjamin

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception from Dialectic of Enlightenment

Louis Althusser

From Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

Raymond Williams

From Marxism and Literature

Fredric Jameson

From The Political Unconscious

　

6. New Historicism and Cultural Studies

Hayden White

The Historical Text as Literary Artifact

Pierre Bourdieu

From Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste

Stuart Hall

Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms

Nancy Armstrong

Some Call It Fiction: On the Politics of Domesticity

Stephen Greenblatt

Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance

King Lear and Harsnetts "Devil-Fiction"

John Guillory

From Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation

7. Feminist Criticism

Nina Baym

Melodramas of Beset Manhood

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

From Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship

Annette Kolodny

Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism

Julia Kristeva

Women’s Time

Barbara Smith

Toward a Black Feminist Criticism

8. Gender Studies and Queer Theory

Michel Foucault

From The History of Sexuality

Monique Wittig

One Is Not Born a Woman

Hélène Cixous

The Laugh of the Medusa

Gayle Rubin

From The Traffic in Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of Sex

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

From Between Men

From Epistemology of the Closet

Judith Butler

Imitation and Gender Insubordination

9. Postcolonialism and Ethnic Studies

Edward W. Said

From the Introduction to Orientalism

Benedict Anderson

The Origins of National Consciousness

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism

Gloria Anzaldua

La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness

Barbara Christian

The Race for Theory

Homi K. Bhabha

Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Writing, "Race," and the Difference It Makes

Rey Chow

The Interruption of Referentiality: Poststructuralism and the Conundrum of Critical Multiculturalism

ALTERNATIVE CONTENTS

INDEX

　
Headshot of David H. Richter

David H. Richter

David H. Richter (PhD, University of Chicago) is professor and director of graduate studies in the English Department at Queens College and professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Richter publishes in the fields of narrative theory and eighteenth-century literature. Recent titles include The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel (1996); Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century Literature (1999); and The Critical Tradition (Bedford/St. Martins, 1998), and he is currently at work on two critical books: a cultural history of true crime fiction and an analysis of difficulty in biblical narrative.