Given the persistent interrogation of an organicist conception of literary work by structuralist and post-structuralist critics, this study examines literary text as a depersonalized product, independent of its author and reader, and excitingly open to critical pluralism. It focuses closely on several major literary texts and probes how far theory guided reading reveals their subtexts and intertexts, and decodes their relativised rather than universal meanings. Since the book demonstrates that the applications of diverse theoretical positions in the hermeneutic field, although illuminating, are limiting and digressive as well, it makes for an open-ended scrutiny of the currently much lauded, theory-oriented literary criticism.