Literary criticism
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A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory is a matter of some controversy. For example, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism[1] draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism, and almost always uses the terms together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary criticism a practical application of literary theory, because criticism always deals directly with particular literary works, while theory may be more general or abstract.
Literary criticism is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in literature departments and publish in
History
Classical and medieval criticism
Literary criticism is thought to have existed as far back as the classical period.[2] In the 4th century BC Aristotle wrote the Poetics, a typology and description of literary forms with many specific criticisms of contemporary works of art. Poetics developed for the first time the concepts of mimesis and catharsis, which are still crucial in literary studies. Plato's attacks on poetry as imitative, secondary, and false were formative as well. The Sanskrit Natya Shastra includes literary criticism on ancient Indian literature and Sanskrit drama.
Later classical and
Literary criticism was also employed in other forms of medieval
Renaissance criticism
The literary criticism of the Renaissance developed classical ideas of unity of form and content into literary neoclassicism, proclaiming literature as central to culture, entrusting the poet and the author with preservation of a long literary tradition. The birth of Renaissance criticism was in 1498, with the recovery of classic texts, most notably, Giorgio Valla's Latin translation of Aristotle's Poetics. The work of Aristotle, especially Poetics, was the most important influence upon literary criticism until the late eighteenth century. Lodovico Castelvetro was one of the most influential Renaissance critics who wrote commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics in 1570.
Baroque criticism
The seventeenth-century witnessed the first full-fledged crisis in modernity of the core critical-aesthetic principles inherited from
Enlightenment criticism
In the
19th-century Romantic criticism
The British
The New Criticism
However important all of these aesthetic movements were as antecedents, current ideas about literary criticism derive almost entirely from the new direction taken in the early twentieth century. Early in the century the school of criticism known as
Theory
In 1957 Northrop Frye published the influential Anatomy of Criticism. In his works Frye noted that some critics tend to embrace an ideology, and to judge literary pieces on the basis of their adherence to such ideology. This has been a highly influential viewpoint among modern conservative thinkers. E. Michael Jones, for example, argues in his Degenerate Moderns that Stanley Fish was influenced by his own adulterous affairs to reject classic literature that condemned adultery.[10] Jürgen Habermas, in Erkenntnis und Interesse [1968] (Knowledge and Human Interests), described literary critical theory in literary studies as a form of hermeneutics: knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions – including the interpretation of texts which themselves interpret other texts.
In the British and American literary establishment, the New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s. Around that time Anglo-American university literature departments began to witness a rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory, influenced by structuralism, then post-structuralism, and other kinds of Continental philosophy. It continued until the mid-1980s, when interest in "theory" peaked. Many later critics, though undoubtedly still influenced by theoretical work, have been comfortable simply interpreting literature rather than writing explicitly about methodology and philosophical presumptions.
Current state
Today, approaches based in
Some critics work largely with theoretical texts, while others read traditional literature; interest in the literary
History of the book
Related to other forms of literary criticism, the
Among the issues within the history of literature with which book history can be seen to intersect are: the development of authorship as a profession, the formation of reading audiences, the constraints of censorship and copyright, and the economics of literary form.
Major twentieth-century schools of critical analysis
- Historicist approaches
- New Historicism
- Formalist approaches
- Russian Formalism
- Narratology
- Structuralism
- Post-structuralism
- Deconstructionism
- Literary Modernism
- Post-modernism
- Reader-response criticism
- Semiotic literary criticism
- New Criticism
- Genre studies
- Hermeneutics
- Political approaches
- Marxist literary criticism
- Cultural studies
- Postcolonialism
- Feminist literary criticism
- Ecocriticism
- Psychological approaches
- Race and sexuality approaches
Key texts
Classical and medieval periods
- Plato: Ion, Republic, Cratylus
- Aristotle: Poetics, Rhetoric
- Horace: Art of Poetry
- Longinus: On the Sublime
- Plotinus: On the Intellectual Beauties
- St. Augustine: On Christian Doctrine
- Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy
- Aquinas: The Nature and Domain of Sacred Doctrine
- Dante: The Banquet, Letter to Cangrande Della Scala
- Boccaccio: Life of Dante, Genealogy of the Gentile Gods
- Christine de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies
- Bharata Muni: Natya Shastra
- Rajashekhara: Inquiry into Literature
- Valmiki: The Invention of Poetry (from the Ramayana)
- Anandavardhana: Light on Suggestion
- Cao Pi: A Discourse on Literature
- Lu Ji: Rhymeprose on Literature
- Liu Xie: The Literary Mind
- Wang Changling: A Discussion of Literature and Meaning
- Sikong Tu: The Twenty-Four Classes of Poetry
Renaissance period
- Lodovico Castelvetro: The Poetics of Aristotle Translated and Explained
- Philip Sidney: An Apology for Poetry
- Jacopo Mazzoni: On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante
- Torquato Tasso: Discourses on the Heroic Poem
- Francis Bacon: The Advancement of Learning
- Henry Reynolds: Mythomystes
- John Mandaville: Composed in the mid-14th century – most probably by a french physician
Enlightenment period
- Thomas Hobbes: Answer to Davenant's preface to Gondibert
- Pierre Corneille: Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place
- John Dryden: An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
- Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux: The Art of Poetry
- John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
- John Dennis: The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry
- Alexander Pope: An Essay on Criticism
- Joseph Addison: On the Pleasures of the Imagination (Spectator essays)
- Giambattista Vico: The New Science
- Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
- David Hume: Of the Standard of Taste
- Samuel Johnson: On Fiction, Rasselas, Preface to Shakespeare
- Edward Young: Conjectures on Original Composition
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Laocoön
- Joshua Reynolds: Discourses on Art
- Richard "Conversation" Sharp Letters & Essays in Prose & Verse
- James Usher :Clio: or a Discourse on Taste (1767)[12]
- Denis Diderot: The Paradox of Acting
- Immanuel Kant: Critique of Judgment
- Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven or Hell, Letter to Thomas Butts, Annotations to Reynolds' Discourses, A Descriptive Catalogue, A Vision of the Last Judgment, On Homer's Poetry
- Friedrich Schiller: Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
- Friedrich Schlegel: Critical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments, On Incomprehensibility
19th century
- William Wordsworth: Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads
- Anne Louise Germaine de Staël: Literature in its Relation to Social Institutions
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling: On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Genius, On the Principles of Genial Criticism, The Statesman's Manual, Biographia Literaria
- Wilhelm von Humboldt: Collected Works
- John Keats: letters to Benjamin Bailey, George & Thomas Keats, John Taylor, and Richard Woodhouse
- Arthur Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Idea
- Thomas Love Peacock: The Four Ages of Poetry
- Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Defence of Poetry
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Conversations with Eckermann, Maxim No. 279
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Philosophy of Fine Art
- Giacomo Leopardi: Zibaldone (notebooks)
- Francesco de Sanctis: Critical Essays; History of the Italian Literature
- Thomas Carlyle: Symbols
- John Stuart Mill: What is Poetry?
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Poet
- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve: What Is a Classic?
- James Russell Lowell: A Fable for Critics
- Edgar Allan Poe: The Poetic Principle
- Matthew Arnold: Preface to the 1853 Edition of Poems, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, The Study of Poetry
- Hippolyte Taine: History of English Literature and Language
- Charles Baudelaire: The Salon of 1859
- Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
- Søren Kierkegaard: Two Ages: A Literary Review, The Concept of Irony
- Friedrich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense
- Walter Pater: Studies in the History of the Renaissance
- Émile Zola: The Experimental Novel
- Anatole France: The Adventures of the Soul
- Oscar Wilde: The Decay of Lying
- Stéphane Mallarmé: The Evolution of Literature, The Book: A Spiritual Mystery, Mystery in Literature
- What is Art?
20th century
- Benedetto Croce: Aesthetic
- Antonio Gramsci : Prison Notebooks
- Umberto Eco: The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas; The Open Work
- A. C. Bradley: Poetry for Poetry's Sake
- Sigmund Freud: Creative Writers and Daydreaming
- Ferdinand de Saussure: Course in General Linguistics
- Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Structural Study of Myth
- Bergson's Theory of Art
- Walter Benjamin: On Language as Such and On the Language of Man
- Viktor Shklovsky: Art as Technique
- T. S. Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent; Hamlet and His Problems
- Irving Babbitt: Romantic Melancholy
- Carl Jung: On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry
- Leon Trotsky: The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism
- Boris Eikhenbaum: The Theory of the "Formal Method"
- Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own
- I. A. Richards: Practical Criticism
- Mikhail Bakhtin: Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel
- Georges Bataille: The Notion of Expenditure
- John Crowe Ransom: Poetry: A Note in Ontology; Criticism as Pure Speculation
- R. P. Blackmur: A Critic's Job of Work
- Jacques Lacan: The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience; The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud
- György Lukács: The Ideal of the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois Aesthetics; Art and Objective Truth
- Paul Valéry: Poetry and Abstract Thought
- Kenneth Burke: Literature as Equipment for Living
- Ernst Cassirer: Art
- W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley: The Intentional Fallacy, The Affective Fallacy
- Cleanth Brooks: The Heresy of Paraphrase; Irony as a Principle of Structure
- Jan Mukařovský: Standard Language and Poetic Language
- Jean-Paul Sartre: Why Write?
- Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex
- Ronald Crane: Toward a More Adequate Criticism of Poetic Structure
- Philip Wheelwright: The Burning Fountain
- Theodor Adorno: Cultural Criticism and Society; Aesthetic Theory
- Roman Jakobson: The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles
- Northrop Frye: Anatomy of Criticism; The Critical Path
- Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space
- Ernst Gombrich: Art and Illusion
- Hölderlinand the Essence of Poetry
- E. D. Hirsch Jr.: Objective Interpretation
- Noam Chomsky: Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
- Jacques Derrida: Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
- Roland Barthes: The Structuralist Activity; The Death of the Author
- Michel Foucault: Truth and Power; What Is an Author?; The Discourse on Language
- Hans Robert Jauss: Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory
- Georges Poulet: Phenomenology of Reading
- Raymond Williams: The Country and the City
- Lionel Trilling: The Liberal Imagination;
- Julia Kristeva: From One Identity to Another; Women's Time
- Paul de Man: Semiology and Rhetoric; The Rhetoric of Temporality
- Harold Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence; The Dialectics of Poetic Tradition; Poetry, Revisionism, Repression
- Chinua Achebe: Colonialist Criticism
- Stanley Fish: Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes Without Saying, and Other Special Cases; Is There a Text in This Class?
- Edward Said: The World, the Text, and the Critic; Secular Criticism
- Elaine Showalter: Toward a Feminist Poetics
- Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: Infection in the Sentence; The Madwoman in the Attic
- Murray Krieger: "A Waking Dream": The Symbolic Alternative to Allegory
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
- René Girard: The Sacrificial Crisis
- Hélène Cixous: The Laugh of the Medusa
- Jonathan Culler: Beyond Interpretation
- Geoffrey Hartman: Literary Commentary as Literature
- Wolfgang Iser: The Repertoire
- Hayden White: The Historical Text as Literary Artifact
- Hans-Georg Gadamer: Truth and Method
- Paul Ricoeur: The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling
- Peter Szondi: On Textual Understanding
- M. H. Abrams: How to Do Things with Texts
- J. Hillis Miller: The Critic as Host
- Clifford Geertz: Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought
- Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism
- Tristan Tzara: Unpretentious Proclamation
- André Breton: The Surrealist Manifesto; The Declaration of 27 January 1925
- Mina Loy: Feminist Manifesto
- Yokomitsu Riichi: Sensation and New Sensation
- Oswald de Andrade: Cannibalist Manifesto
- André Breton, Leon Trotsky and Diego Rivera: Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art
- Hu Shih: Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature
- Octavio Paz: The Bow and the Lire
See also
- Book review
- Comparative literature
- Critical lens
- Genre studies
- History of the book
- Literary critics
- Literary translation
- Philosophy and literature
- Poetic tradition
- Social criticism
- Translation criticism
References
- OCLC 54374476.
- ^ "Literary Theory | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy". Archived from the original on 27 November 2020. Retrieved 1 December 2020.
- OCLC 10350183.
- ^ Jon R. Snyder, L’estetica del Barocco (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), 21–22.
- ISBN 978-0-521-46573-1.
- ISBN 978-0-226-03402-7.
- OCLC 277203534.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-61148-478-6.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8032-7232-3.
- OCLC 28241358.
- ^ "Contemporary Women's Writing | Oxford Academic". OUP Academic. Archived from the original on 7 August 2019. Retrieved 1 August 2019.
- ^ Ussher, J. (1767). Clio Or, a Discourse on Taste: Addressed to a Young Lady. Davies. p. 3. Retrieved 10 October 2014.
External links
- Literary Criticism at the Encyclopædia Britannica
- Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Literary Criticism
- Vince Brewton. "Literary Theory". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- José Ángel García Landa. "A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology".
- Internet Public Library: Literary Criticism Collection of Critical and Biographical Websites
- How to Do Literary Analysis: An Experimental Reflection Based on the Yellow Wall-Paper
- Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism Award Winners