Literary Lenses

Psychoanalytical

authors and characters affected by inner desires and past traumas

Archetypal

universal qualities of a test (hero’s journey)

Reader Response

a reader brings personal, social and cultural connections to a text and finds their own meaning from that text

Feminist/Gender

looking at gender roles, social commentary about women and the way that characters meet or defy stereotypes

1: Late 1700s-early 1900s: (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Susan B Anthony)

2: 1960s-1970s: women protesting and advocating rights

3: 1990s-present: focus on women’s experiences

Marxist

readers look at how social class creates, shapes, influences the plot and characters

New Historicist

very much aligned with the perspectives of literary periods and social histories, examines the historical context in which a text was produced

consciously or unconsciously, an author comments upon that social world in fiction

be aware of Bias

Deconstructionist

a text will always have small contradictions and paradoxes within it.

undermine the objective meaning of language

Saussure: signs and signifiers

Derrida: language at its core has no meaning and nothing exists outside of the text