Book excerpt: Steven Lynn's ground breaking Literature: Reading and Writing with Critical Strategies energizes literary study by demonstrating, step by step, how to use critical approaches to engage literary texts and evolve critical arguments. Plentiful examples demonstrate the process of thinking and writing about literature progressing from a blank page to an insightful response and, ultimately, to a final essay using a variety of critical theories as invention strategies. A richly diverse selection of classical and contemporary works short stories, poems, and plays is included.