One of the more interesting phenomena of recent years has been the burgeoning interest in psychoanalysis among literary critics. As psychoanalysts find themselves increasingly drawn to a view of their discipline as a hermeneutic one, more literary scholars appear to be turning to it as a means of enhancing their understanding of texts and readers' responses to them.

In this densely written, carefully conceived and generally impressive book, Dr. Skura delineates the various ways in which psychoanalytic thinking has been and can be used in the service of literary criticism. In doing so, she elaborates, extends, and comments on the work of her many predecessors and peers in the field—Trilling, Burke, Holland, Habermas, Derrida among them—as she formulates her own proposal for a new approach to the enterprise.

It is her argument that hitherto four modes of psychoanalytic inquiry have served as models for the critic—the case history, the