Norman Holland was unquestionably the leading 20th-century American psychoanalytic literary critic. Long known as the Dean of American psychoanalytic literary critics, Holland produced an enormous body of scholarship that appeals to both neophytes in the field and advanced researchers, many of whom have been influenced by his writings. Holland was one of the first proponents of reader-response criticism, the theorist of readers' identity themes, and the author of fifteen books that have become classics in the field. Jeffrey Berman analyzes all of Holland's books, and many of his 250 scholarly articles, highlighting continuities and discontinuities in the critic's thinking over time. A controversial if not polarizing figure, Holland is discussed in relation to his closest colleagues, including Murray Schwartz, Bernard Paris, and Leslie Fiedler, as well as his fiercest critics, among them Frederick Crews, David Bleich, and Jonathan Culler, creating a dynamic and personal portrait. Insofar as this text illuminates the evolving mind of a premier literary critic, it produces a parallel profile of the American reader, the primary object of Holland's extensive work.

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