Clifton Snider - Critic and Scholar

Critic and Scholar

He went to Southern California College (an Assemblies of God institution now called Vanguard University) on music and academic scholarships. After two years, he transferred to California State University, Long Beach, where he finished his B.A., graduating with honors in 1969, and his M.A. (1971). He received his Ph.D. in English Literature in 1974 from the University of New Mexico. Snider's doctoral dissertation is a Jungian analysis of Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse, and he has published numerous articles on Victorian literature, as well as twentieth century English and American literatures. These include introductions to Jungian psychology (or Analytical Psychology) and criticism, histories of Merlin in 19th-century British literature, as well as such authors as W. H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, Edward Lear, Carson McCullers, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. A specialist in Wilde, he has taught his own seminars on him at California State University, Long Beach, and published several articles on Wilde using his primary critical approaches of Jungian and Queer Criticism. He also taught the first course ever on Gays and Lesbians in Literature at Cal State Long Beach. His book, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On: A Jungian Interpretation of Literature, contains a chapter on Wilde. His latest article uses Jungian and Queer Criticism to examine Brokeback Mountain, story and film, and appears in the Jungian journal, Psychological Perspectives, January, 2008.

Snider's shorter pieces of criticism have appeared in many periodicals, among them The Advocate, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, and the Los Angeles Times. In the early 1980s he was a contributing editor for the Maelstrom Review.