Christian subject matter ; Aquinas ’ s Summa Theologica outlines the four levels of interpretation still used today . The Enlightenment is characterized by the development of print culture , modern reviewing , the dictionary and encyclopedia – all contribute giant strides towards analyses of political rhetoric , feminism , and aesthetis . The rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century is swiftly followed by Realism , Nationalism , seminal texts by Arnold and Nietzsche , and reactionary fin-de-siécle fictions .
Chapters 6 through 9 encompass twentieth-and twentyfirst century Formalist , Historicist , Political , and Psychoanalytic approaches . Stevens does an excellent job of breaking down the nuances of various approaches from French Linguistics , Russian and Anglo-American Formalisms , Structuralist anthropology and semiotics , Narratology , and Deconstruction . Historicist approaches include notable figures like Foucault , Greenblatt , and Bourdieu , as well as book history and the rise of digital humanities . Political approaches start , naturally , with Marx ’ s theory , and branch out into schools and studies that define the twentieth century : post-colonial and ethnic studies , Orientalism , the African-American tradition , feminist theory , sexuality and queer theory , and disability and environmental studies . Freud and his disciples round out the chapters on contemporary approaches .
The final chapter pragmatically moves from theory to practice . Stevens takes two canonical examples of literature — Hamlet and Frankenstein — and highlights how the various approaches can be applied to these works to read and understand them through different lenses . It is this last chapter that is most universally useful ; through two well-known works of literature , the vast array of interpretation available to readers , as consumers of
242