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The I gathers and clarifies concepts Norman Holland has developed over the past fifteen years, beginning with Poems in Persons (1973), Five Readers Reading (1975), and Laughing (1982), as well as seminal essays in PMLA and Critical Inquiry.
Prior to these works, all of which concern themselves with the nature of how readers read – the ways in which all forms of art are experienced through the particular 'fit' of individual psyche, texts, and cultural contexts – Holland had firmly established himself as a Shakespearean scholar with the publication, in 1964, of The Shakespearean Imagination. However, as a result of his own earlier exposure to psychoanalytic training, he wrote the most comprehensive study to date on Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1966). He himself tends to play down his subsequent, purely theoretical book of applied psychoanalysis, The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968), perhaps because it focuses much more on texts than on the specific, subjective data of readers as they read those texts. But for many of us, Dynamics remains the most articulate and comprehensive survey of psychoanalytic theories applied to literature.
In the four books and numerous articles that followed Dynamics, Holland has carefully evolved a theory of reading derived from his own identity theory: 'Identity theory says we take in the other – literature, people, society, politics, culture, even our genders and selves – through our identities, which are themselves representations. That is the thesis of this book, and I believe it is true' (p. 287). The I demonstrates the achievement of this theory in its most lucid form; it also displays flaws that seem, perhaps inevitably, to attach themselves to such a relentless charting of the subjective imagination.
The I consists of four sections followed by an invaluable Appendix that supplements the theory of the book with a survey of psychoanalytic theory – classical psychoanalysis, ego-psychology, self-psychology,