A Beginner's Guide to Critical Reading: An Anthology of Literary Texts »

The combination of fascinating texts, critically up-to-the minute readings and Richard Jacob's engaging, lively approach makes this a book every fan or student of literature should own. Jacobs has assembled an invaluable collection of literary texts and provides accompanying commentaries designed to help you contextualize your own responses.
This Introductory work brings together interesting texts and engaging commentary. In his commentaries, Richard Jacobs explains some of the most crucial issues in literary studies today; includes advice for those wishing to read more about a particular issue or critical approach; and reveals, through his obvious enjoyment of the texts he discusses, that literary studies can be pleasurable and energizing for everyone.
Written with freshness, insight, and humor, this guide will prove invaluable on your literary and critical journeys. Texts examined include: The Merchant of Venice, Paradise Lost, Gulliver's Travels, Wuthering Heights, "The Yellow Wallpaper," The Turn of the Screw and The Secret Agent.

Acknowledgements
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, Centers, 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 Price: 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 Theater, Policing the Allowable on Stage and in Film
22. Hill's "September Song": The Modern Poet inHistory, The Poem's right to Exist
23. Beckett's Not I: Challenging the Audience with a Life, Lost
24. Bishop and Berryman's Poems: How to Lose, and Loss in This Book
Appendix: Ovid's "Narcissus"