Close Reading and Its Alternatives: An Essential Reader

Close Reading and Its Alternatives provides an up-to-date and consolidated history of the literary and analytical technique and philosophy of close reading. It offers an essential guide to the features and genealogies of close reading, and how it intersects with literary theories like feminist criticism, queer theory, cultural studies, digital humanities, game studies, and more.

Divided into five parts, the book contains 21 influential essays on close reading and on alternative methods that have arisen in the past few decades. These primary texts are contextualized by and analyzed in six original and insightful introductions. These works combine to trace the invention of close reading around the time of New Criticism. The book then shows how close reading evolved when it is taken up by poststructuralist thought, such as Marxism, deconstruction, and New Historicism. Turning to the twenty-first century, the volume explores the rise of the critiques of close reading that are distinguished by their attempts to offer alternative methods: distant reading; reparative reading, just and surface reading, and thin description; and too-close reading.

Close reading is inescapably central in the field of literary studies, and beyond. This comprehensive resource will enhance understanding and enrich the reading experience of students and teachers of literature.

Mun-Hou Lo is an associate professor at NUS College, National University of Singapore.