The Handy Literature Answer Book: Understand and Enjoy Meanings, Symbolism, and Signs in Great Works is an engaging, easy-to-read look at literature basics such as themes, symbols, context, and other literary devices.

Table of Contents

• PHOTO SOURCES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• WHAT IS LITERATURE AND HOW TO READ IT
• WHY READ LITERATURE & HOW NOT TO READ IT
• Don't Read Literature Like You Do Ordinary Writing
• Don't Just Read Literature, Reread It
• Don't Read Literature Passively
• Don't Speed-Read Literature
• Don't Read Literature Only to Identify
• Don't Read Literature for Meaning (First)
• HOW TO READ POETRY
• An Analysis of Emily Dickinson's “I Like to See It Lap the Miles”
• An Analysis of William Butler Yeats's “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
• An Analysis of Tennyson's “Ulysses”
• HOW TO READ SHORT STORIES
• “The Gift of the Magi”
• “The Story of an Hour”
• Nineteenth-Century Short Stories
• Anton Chekhov
• James Joyce
• Analysis of Joyce's “Araby”
• American Short Story Innovations in the Twentieth Century
• HOW TO READ THE NOVEL
• Moll Flanders
• The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
• Women Characters in Early Novels
• Jane Austen
• Emma
• The English Novel after Jane Austen
• Charles Dickens
• Analysis of Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers
• Serial Novels
• Victorian Novels
• How Are Novels Constructed?
• George Eliot's Middle-march
• The Modern Novel
• James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• The Novel and Modernism
• Ralph Ellison’ Invisible Man
• Toni Morrison's Beloved
• Subgenres of the Novel
• HOW TO READ DRAMA
• Greek and Roman Drama
• Elizabethan Drama and Shakespeare
• How to Read a Shakespearean Play: Analyzing A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Early European Drama
• Reading Neoclassical Drama—Molière's Tartuffe
• Reading Neoclassical Drama—Racine's Phèdre
• Seventeenth-Century Theater Continued
• Reading a Modern Drama—Ibsen's A Doll's House
• Reading a Modern Drama—Checkhov's The Cherry Orchard
• Modern Drama
• Reading a Modern Drama—Brecht's Mother Courage
• Reading a Modern Drama— Beckett's Waiting for Godot
• Contemporary Drama
• Reading Contemporary Drama—Wilson's Fences
• Reading Contemporary Drama—Kushner's Angels in America
• HOW TO READ LITERARY NONFICTION
• Analysis of Montaigne's “Of Smells”
• Essays
• Autobiography and Memoir
• Analysis of Langston Hughes's “Salvation”
• Analysis of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior
• Creative Nonfiction
• CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE
• Critical Approaches to Literature
• Psychological and Psychoanalytical Criticism
• Marxist Critical Approach
• Structuralism
• Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction
• Historical Criticism and New Historicism
• Gender Studies
• Cultural Studies and Post-Colonial Criticism
• Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory
• Choosing an Approach
• GLOSSARY OF ESSENTIAL LITERARY TERMS
• LISTING OF SELECTED ESSENTIAL POEMS, STORIES, NOVELS, AND DRAMAS
• FURTHER READING