Literary Theory

This is an outstanding anthology which covers an impressive number of the seminal works in Literary Criticism for today.

I found Rivkin's anthology to be comprehensive in terms of the variety of schools of thought covered. I bought it for a class, and my single complaint about the book and the class is the same: I feel that I'm not getting a full and comprehensive understanding of each individual theorist's work. But I suppose if I were a more dedicated scholar, I'd just read each theorist's complete works on my own instead of buying an introduction to critical theory. So, if you would like a deep understanding of a few individual theorists, this is not the book for you. But if you are looking to get an overview with many important details of the recent history (i.e. the last 100 years) of critical theory, I would highly recommend this book.

This book was used in my graduate level current literary theory course. It is a wonderful text that supplies ready access to the writers and texts that helped to shape what theory is today. It is not the intention of this book to necessarily apply these theories and show how they can be used. Often, the texts included seem to have no bearing on literature. That is simply because they were not all written as literary theory texts when they were penned. Instead, theory absorbed them and changed itself based upon the ideas in the text. This book is an anthology, not a guide. For a book that shows how to use theory, I recommend Lois Tyson's Critical Theory Today. For a book that shows the texts that each theory is based upon, buy this one.

(Complaints about "jargon" are simply reactions against theory.) I find this book very useful and teach it to undergrads annually.

With all apologies to Alan Lopez, I have never seen a better anthology of literary theory. I am a college faculty member, one who teaches primarily first-year students. I use literary theory in both literature and writing classes, and there is just no other book with the range of selections in this one, and no other book with such sensible, helpful introductions. Certainly there is jargon, in both the selections and in the introductions, but to simplify the texts any more would be to replace reading them with reading "Foucault for Beginners." "Foucault for Beginners" is a fun book, and even useful, but it is not an anthology of primary theory texts. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough to people who want to have selections of a workable length (neither too long to swamp you, nor too short to be unrepresentative of the original authors' projects). If you are thinking about buying this book, that means you are interested in theory. If you are interested in theory, buy this book. If you teach theory, order this book. My only hesitation about requiring this for undergraduates is the price, which is a little hefty unless you are going to be sure to use a decent size chunk of the text.