ABSTRACT
The adversarial context is at least equally interested in a theory that is not, in essence, literary, and in ideas that aren't straightforwardly generated by the text itself. Literary analysis employs ecocritical, psychoanalytic, new historical, structuralist, post-structuralist, deconstructive, post-colonialist, cognitive and queer theories, amongst others. These can all be used as adversarial contexts for a given literary text. This chapter presents three short case studies that demonstrates how close reading using the adversarial context can further appreciation of literature. In the case of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, there is a most remarkable and useful resource: their letters. In the second case study use the example of Marxist literary theory, which is, fundamentally, interested in two things: first, the economic aspects of a text; second, the relationship between the classes. In this final case study, use the adversarial context of feminism to revisit the generic context of the gothic.
