A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, Fourth Edition offers readers and students a variety of ways of looking at a piece of literature, ranging from traditional approaches through the formalist, the psychological, the mythic and archetypal, and into some of the most helpful and rewarding approaches in contemporary criticism, including the feminist approach and that of cultural studies. In most of its chapters, the particular approach under discussion is applied to each of the five works treated throughout the book. The result is an eclectic arrary of readings that shows how different approaches offer different insights, while enriching the total response to and understanding of the individual work.