Norman N. Holland

Jeffrey Berman is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York, USA, where he has been teaching since 1973. He is the author or coauthor of more than twenty books, including Confidentiality and Its Discontents, coauthored with Paul Mosher, which received the 2017 Book Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association. An Honorary Member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was selected by the Princeton Review in 2012 as one of the country’s top 300 professors.

• 1. Writing Non-Psychoanalytically: The First Modern Comedies and The Shakespearean Imagination2. Becoming a Freudian: Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare3. Theorizing Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: The Dynamics of Literary Response4. Developing a New Model of Reader-Response Criticism: Poems in Persons and 5 Readers Reading5. Extending Identity Theory in the 1980s: “Re-Covering ‘The Purloined Letter,” Laughing, The I and Being Human, and The Brain of Robert Frost6. Speaking in a Lone Voice Among the New Cryptics: Holland’s Guide and The Critical I7. Penning Fiction: “A Cyberreader Defends” and Death in a Delphi Seminar 8. Exposing the Film Critic’s Free Associations: Meeting Movies9. Venturing into a New Field: Literature and the Brain10. Contemplating EndingsConclusion: Norman Holland’s LegacyWorks Cited

Jeffrey Berman’s brilliant critical biography of Norman Holland is a major contribution to the history of 20th-century criticism and should be on the desk of anyone interested in how the debates about the function and meaning of literature shifted during this tumultuous period. Comprehensive, well-written, and as engaging as Norman Holland was as a critic and a personality.