Critical approaches to literature reveal how or why a particular work is constructed and what its social and cultural implications are. Understanding critical perspectives will help you to see and appreciate a literary work as a multilayered construct of meaning. Reading literary criticism will inspire you to reread, rethink, and respond. Soon you will be a full participant in an endless and enriching conversation about literature.

Critical Approaches Interactive Exercises for “Young Goodman Brown”

Linked below are exercises on how to interpret “Young Goodman Brown” from different critical approaches. Responses to the exercises can be added to your notebook—this will be collated so that you can print or e-mail your work when you are finished.

>Structuralism
>Psychoanalytic Criticism
>Feminist Criticism
>Marxist Criticism
>The New Criticism
>Formalism
>Deconstruction
>The New Historicism

For a model essay about “Young Goodman Brown” written from a particular critical approach, select either of the links below:

>Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”: A Psychoanalytic Reading (PDF)

>Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and Erring in the Wilderness: A Postcolonial Reading (PDF)

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