Preface; Introduction; Can Analysis be Pleasurable Too?; In the Beginning is the word; Summary; 1. Seven pleasures of reading; Pleasure 1: beginnings; Pleasure 2: meeting people; Pleasure 3: creating a world of word; Pleasure 4: hearing voices; Pleasure 5: finding ourselves; Pleasure 6: anticipating plots; Pleasure 7: lessons along the way; And one more pleasure: re-reading; 2. The semantic context; 1 Situational semantics; 2 Historical semantics; 3 Figurative semantics; Further Reading; 3. The syntactic and thematic contexts

1 The sentence2 The paragraph; 3 From syntactic to thematic contexts; Further Reading; 4. Getting to the crux of things: Hamlet, a case study; 1 A sense of the whole: Hamlet's plot; 2 The crux: semantic and thematic contexts; 3 The crux: syntactic and thematic contexts; 4 The crux: semantic, syntactic and thematic contexts; Further Reading; 5. The iterative context, Part 1: character and plot; 1 Repetition and the iterative context; 2 Character in the light of the whole; 3 Plotting a whole; 4 Place: iteration and resolution; 5 Endings and iterations; Further Reading

6. The iterative context, Part 2: sounds and rhythms1 Sound, repetition and iteration; 2 A short poem; 3 A longer poem; 4 Metre matters; 5 Free verse; Further Reading; 7. The generic context; 1 Magic and the generic context; 2 The sonnet; 3 Tragedy; 4 The novel; Further Reading; 8. The adversarial context; Case study 1: Biography and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese; Case study 2: Marxism and The Great Gatsby; Case study 3: Feminism and Wuthering Heights; Conclusion: Adversarial appreciation and the futures of close reading; Further Reading; Glossary; Bibliography