A popular modern critical approach still alive at many universities is the economic determinist or Marxist approach. It concerns itself with the class struggle between the workers who produce capital and those who control capital. It looks at the economic status of characters in a story and what happens to them as a result of that status. Cultural criticism also is interested in the economic and political aspects of a work and why a certain aesthetic product is more valued than others. Such critics might examine why Shakespeare s Henry V started off as a play enjoyed by working class people, later became a highbrow play enjoyed only by the educated, and still later during World War II became popular again as a patriotic statement about embattled Englishmen.
Girls suffer from penis envy.
Childhood traumas shape adult life. The interpretation of dreams is necessary. Reader-response holds that the reader is the third party in a relationship with text and author. The reader makes a transaction with the work, assimilating and actualizing it in light of the reader s knowledge and experience. Religious and political beliefs, gender, life experiences all shape how a reader responds to a work.