Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #124173 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Customer Reviews

Get more out of your reading
Very entertaining, informative and easy to understand. If you want to brush up on the symbolism in your reading, I would definitely recommend. The only downside is he uses a lot of American literature for his examples of the techniques in practice, due to the fact he's an American professor, and assumes that all his readers will be American too - this does not greatly spoil the enjoyment but clearly it would be better if you are familiar with the texts. On the flipside, this has certainly made me want to seek out some of the novels and short stories that seem to be the staple of American high schools. He even manages to makes something like Joyce's Ulysses seem a less daunting task.

Not bad
I read this book in order to improve my understanding of literature. There were some interesting discussions of various works and the author used a short story by Katherine Mansfield in order to demonstrate some techniques.

Although it wasn't a bad read, I felt that some other books had taught me far more such as Richard Gill's "Mastering English Literaure " and the "How to Study English Literature" series edited by John Peck and Martin Coyle. I would therefore recommended those books rather than this for anyone interested in sharpening up their literary criticism skills.