Literary Theory & Criticism
The
foundation of Western literary theory: mimesis, the moral/social function of
poetry, and rules of composition.
Greek
Criticism
Period: 5th
century BC – 3rd century AD
Key
Terms:
• Mimesis
— Imitation
of life and nature in art; Plato is the first to use the term.
• Catharsis
— Purgation
of pity and fear through tragedy, leaving 'calm of mind'.
• Hamartia
— The
noble hero's error of judgment or tragic flaw causing his fall.
• Anagnorisis
— Recognition
— the moment of critical discovery of the truth.
• Peripeteia
— Sudden
reversal of fortune or intention in the plot.
• Deus
Ex Machina — 'God from a machine' — artificial device that
resolves the plot; Aristotle first used the term.
• Unity
of Action/Time/Place — The three unities of drama governing
plot coherence.
• Sublime
(Hypsous) — Grandeur of thought and diction that transports the
reader; theorised by Longinus.
• Organic
Unity — Aristotle's
idea that every part of a work must contribute to the whole.
• Ethos,
Pathos, Praxis — Ethical values, emotion/suffering, and
action — the three aspects of imitation.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Plato (428–347 BC) — disciple of
Socrates, teacher of Aristotle (SPA)
-
The Republic (Bks II, III,
X) — poetry is 'thrice removed' from reality (Triad of Beds: Idea → Carpenter's
bed → Painter's imitation); banishes poets from the ideal state; calls poetry
'mother of all lies'
-
Ion — dialogue on
divine poetic inspiration; poet as a magnet transmitting the Muse's power to
rhapsode to audience
-
Symposium — dialogic
philosophical text on love, delivered as a banquet of speeches
o
Aristotle (384–322 BC) — Plato's
student, teacher of Alexander; 'literary theory really begins' with him
(Atkins)
-
Poetics (335 BC, 26 chapters) — defines
tragedy as imitation of a serious, complete action producing catharsis; six
elements: Plot, Character, Thought, Diction, Melody, Spectacle; plot is the
'soul' of tragedy
-
Rhetoric — companion treatise on
persuasive speaking
o
Longinus (1st c. AD, authorship
disputed) — earliest theorist of the sublime
-
On the Sublime (Peri Hypsous) — five
sources of sublimity: great thoughts, strong emotion, figures of speech, noble
diction, dignified word-arrangement; coins faults 'Bombast', 'Puerility',
'Parenthyrsus'
o
Horace (65–8 BC) — Roman poet who
codified rules of poetic craft
-
Ars Poetica (Epistle to the Pisos) —
poetry must be dulce et utile (sweet and useful); 'ut pictura poesis' (as is
painting, so is poetry)
o
Quintilian (35–95 AD) — rhetorician
linking eloquence to virtue
-
InstitutioOratoria — training manual for
the ideal, morally sound orator
o
Cicero (106–43 BC) — statesman-orator
-
De Oratore — the broadly learned ideal
orator
o
Ovid (43 BC–17/18 AD) — Roman poet of
mythological narrative
-
Metamorphoses — epic sourcebook of myth
influential on later criticism
o
Aristophanes (c. 446–386 BC) — Old
Comedy playwright, earliest social/political critic
-
Frogs (405 BC) — debates the relative
merits of Aeschylus (traditional) and Euripides (democratic)
From
theological allegory to the humanist defence of poetry and the birth of English
vernacular criticism.
Medieval
Criticism
Period: 5th–14th
century
Key
Terms:
• Allegory
— Narrative
carrying a parallel symbolic/moral meaning.
• Four
Levels of Meaning — Literal, allegorical, moral, and
anagogical readings of a text.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) — defended
vernacular Italian and allegorical reading
-
Letter to Can Grande — explains the
four-level allegorical method
-
Il Convivio — early defence of
vernacular writing
Early
English Critics (precursors to Sidney)
Period: 16th
century
Key
Terms:
• Inkhorn
terms — Pedantic
Latin/Greek coinages that early critics like Wilson opposed.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Sir John Cheke, Roger Ascham, Thomas
Wilson — Cambridge friends who championed plain English over Latin domination
-
Ascham's Toxophilus ('Lover of the Bow')
and role as Elizabeth I's tutor in Greek and Latin (1548–50)
o
George Gascoigne — wrote the first
English critical essay
-
Certayne Notes of Instruction (1575) —
first manual of English versification; warns against 'rhyme without reason'
o
William Webbe
-
A Discourse of English Poetry (1586) —
historical survey; blames scarcity of good English poetry on lack of prosody,
not talent
o
Richard Puttenham
-
The Art of English Poesie (1589) — most
ambitious Elizabethan attempt to establish English as a poetic language;
praises Wyatt and Surrey
o
Thomas Campion
-
Observations in the Art of Poesie (1602)
— argues classical (quantitative) meters suit English better than rhyme
o
Samuel Daniel
-
Defence of Rhyme (1603) — reply to
Campion, defends rhymed English verse
Renaissance
/ Elizabethan Criticism
Period: 14th–17th
century
Key
Terms:
• Defence
of Poesy — Humanist claim that poetry teaches virtue better
than philosophy or history.
• Poet
as Maker (Vates) — The poet as an inspired 'maker' or
prophet.
• Comedy of Humors — Ben Jonson's theory of character built on the four bodily 'humors'
• Anti-masque
— Comic/grotesque
dance preceding a courtly masque, invented by Ben Jonson.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) —
courtier-poet who defended poetry against Puritan attack
-
An Apology for Poetry / The Defence of
Poesy (written c.1579, pub. 1595) — response to Stephen Gosson's The School of
Abuse; poetry surpasses philosophy (teaches through delight) and history (not
bound to fact); follows a seven-part classical oration structure
o
Ben Jonson (1572–1637) — classicist
playwright and critic; foreshadowed Neoclassicism
-
Timber, or Discoveries (1641) —
'judgment of poets is the faculty of poets, not of all critics, but the best';
champions classical rules
-
Every Man in His Humour — expounds the
'Comedy of Humours'
17th–18th
century England: reason, order, and 'correctness' modelled on classical authors,
flourishing under the Restoration.
Neoclassicism
Period: 1660–1798
Key
Terms:
• Three
Unities — Time,
place, and action; drama should observe formal coherence.
• Wit
and Judgment — Wit generates ideas; judgment refines them into art.
• Poetic
Justice — Literature
should reward virtue and punish vice.
• Legislative
Criticism — Criticism that lays down authorial judgments/rules
(Dryden's Essay).
• Tragi-comedy
— Dryden's
own term for the English mixing of genres unknown to the Ancients.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
John Dryden (1631–1700) — 'Father of
English Criticism' (Dr. Johnson: 'found it brick and left it marble')
-
An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) —
semi-dramatic dialogue of four speakers: Crites (ancients/Ben Jonson), Eugenius
(moderns), Lisideius (French drama), Neander/Dryden (defends English drama and
tragicomedy; calls Shakespeare 'the greatest soul, ancient or modern')
o
Alexander Pope (1688–1744) — Augustan
poet-critic, nicknamed 'The Wasp of Twickenham'
-
An Essay on Criticism (1711) — the
'Neoclassical Manifesto' in heroic couplets, modelled on Horace's Ars Poetica;
'A little learning is a dangerous thing'; three parts covering general
criticism, particular rules, and the ideal critic
o
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) —
lexicographer and moralist critic
-
Preface to Shakespeare — questions rigid
unities; praises Shakespeare's truth to universal nature
-
Lives of the Poets —
biographical-critical essays on English poets
Late
18th–19th century shift from rules to imagination, emotion, organic form, and the
poet's individual genius.
Romanticism
Period: 1798–1830s
Key
Terms:
• Imagination
vs. Fancy — Imagination shapes and unifies (esemplastic power);
fancy merely combines existing images mechanically.
• Primary/Secondary
Imagination — Primary: universal perceptive power in all;
Secondary: the poet's echo of it, a vital shaping force.
• Organic
Form — A
poem's form grows naturally from its content.
• Spontaneous
Overflow of Feeling — Wordsworth's definition of poetry as
emotion 'recollected in tranquility'.
• Willing
Suspension of Disbelief — Coleridge's term for the reader's
voluntary 'poetic faith'.
• Negative
Capability — Keats's term for dwelling in uncertainty without
irritable reaching after fact.
• Egoistical
Sublime — Keats's
critique of Wordsworth's self-centred poetic identity.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) —
championed common speech and feeling
-
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800/1802,
'Manifesto of Romanticism') — poetry as 'spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings recollected in tranquility'; sees no essential difference between
poetry and prose but meter
o
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) —
poet-philosopher of imagination, founder of Lake Poets with Wordsworth
-
Biographia Literaria (1817, 24 chapters)
— distinguishes Primary/Secondary Imagination ('esemplastic power') from
mechanical Fancy; critiques Wordsworth's 'rustic language' theory; coins
'willing suspension of disbelief'
-
Lectures on Shakespeare (1811–19) —
calls Shakespeare the 'myriad-minded man'; Iago's soliloquy as 'motive-hunting of
motiveless Malignity'
o
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) —
radical Romantic poet
-
A Defence of Poetry (1821, unfinished,
pub. 1840) — written partly in response to Peacock's Four Ages of Poetry;
distinguishes Reason (logical) from Imagination (perceptive); ends 'poets are
the unacknowledged legislators of the world'
o
John Keats (1795–1821) — Romantic poet
of aesthetic sensation
-
Letters (1817) — introduces 'Negative
Capability'
o
Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) —
satirist who provoked Shelley's Defence
-
The Four Ages of Poetry (1820) —
Iron/Gold/Silver/Brass Ages; calls the modern poet 'a semi-barbarian in a
civilized society'
o
John Livingston Lowes — 20th-century
Coleridge scholar
-
The Road to Xanadu (1927) — traces the
imaginative sources of 'Kubla Khan' and 'The Ancient Mariner'
Criticism
as cultural guidance in the Victorian age; later, 'art for art's sake' rejects
moralism.
Victorian
Criticism
Period: 1830s–1900
Key
Terms:
• Disinterestedness
— Criticism
free of personal/political interest, seeking 'the best that is known and
thought'.
• Touchstone
Method — Arnold's
technique of judging poetry against short passages from acknowledged masters.
• High
Seriousness — Arnold's criterion that great poetry treats
significant concerns nobly.
• Real/Historic/Personal
Estimate — Arnold's three ways of valuing a poet; only the
'real estimate' is valid.
• Hellenism
and Hebraism — Arnold's contrast (Culture and Anarchy): Hellenism =
knowing; Hebraism = doing.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) — poet-critic
and cultural moralist
-
The Function of Criticism at the Present
Time (1864) — criticism as 'a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate
the best that is known and thought'
-
Culture and Anarchy (1869) —
Hellenism/Hebraism; culture as pursuit of 'sweetness and light'
-
The Study of Poetry (1880) — introduces
the Touchstone Method (borrowed from French critic Villemain); poetry will
replace religion; ranks poets by 'high seriousness'
-
On Translating Homer (1861) — three
lectures on translation
Aestheticism
/ Decadence
Period: 1870s–1890s
Key
Terms:
• Art
for Art's Sake — Art needs no moral justification beyond
its own beauty.
• Impressionistic
Criticism — Criticism recording the critic's subjective
response.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Walter Pater (1839–1894) — aesthetic
critic of intense experience
-
Studies in the History of the
Renaissance — 'to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame'
o
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) — playwright and
aesthete
-
The Critic as Artist — criticism as a
creative art
-
Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray —
'There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book'
19th-century
reaction against Romantic idealism: objective depiction of ordinary life,
intensified in Naturalism by scientific determinism.
Realism
Period: Mid-19th
century, began in France after the 1848 Revolution
Key
Terms:
• Verisimilitude
— The
quality of seeming true/lifelike; no supernaturalism.
• Omniscient
Narrator — All-knowing narrator typical of realist fiction.
• The
Quotidian — Ordinary, everyday events of life as literary
subject.
• Magic
Realism — Realistic
narrative interwoven with matter-of-fact magical elements (term from Franz Roh,
1925; postcolonial use from Jacques Stephen Alexis, 1956).
• Social
/ Socialist / Kitchen-Sink Realism — Sub-types focusing
respectively on class critique, Soviet proletarian struggle, and working-class
British life.
• Psychological
Realism — Realism
focused on characters' inner motivations (stream of consciousness).
Critics
& Key Works:
o
George Eliot (1819–1880) — English
realist novelist and critic
-
Middlemarch (1871–72) — landmark realist
novel; her three principles: pursuit of truth, moralism, authenticity
-
'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' (1856)
— essay attacking sentimental women's fiction
o
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) — pioneer
of the realist social novel
-
La Comédie Humaine — vast panorama of
French society; Père Goriot
o
Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
-
Madame Bovary (1856) — a bored
housewife's affairs
o
Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky — Russian
realists
-
War and Peace, Anna Karenina; Crime and
Punishment — psychological realism
o
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) —
'Father of American Realism'
-
Criticism and Fiction (1891) — 'Realism
is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material'
o
Henry James (1843–1916)
-
The Art of Fiction (1884) — 'the novel
is a direct impression of life'; The Portrait of a Lady
o
Ian Watt — 20th-century critic of the
novel's rise
-
The Rise of the Novel (1957) — argues
the novel's novelty is its 'formal realism' (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding)
Naturalism
Period: 1865–1900,
grown out of Realism
Key
Terms:
• Determinism
— Heredity
and environment, not free will, shape human fate.
• La
Bête Humaine — Zola's phrase: humans behaving like beasts under
social/biological pressure.
• Race,
Milieu, Moment — Hippolyte Taine's formula for
scientifically explaining literature.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Émile Zola (1840–1902) — founder of
literary Naturalism, 'Big Daddy of Naturalism'
-
Le Roman Expérimental — naturalist
manifesto applying scientific/experimental method to fiction
-
Germinal, Nana — novels of social
determinism
o
Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) — French
historian, theoretical founder of Naturalism
-
History of English Literature — formula
of Race, Milieu, Moment; 'vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar'
o
Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) — American
naturalist
-
Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy
o
Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack
London, John Steinbeck — American naturalists
-
The Red Badge of Courage; McTeague; To
Build a Fire; The Grapes of Wrath (Pulitzer)
o
Thomas Hardy
-
Jude the Obscure (1895) — English
naturalist tragedy
Late
19th/early 20th-century reactions against Realism and Naturalism, prizing
suggestive symbol and subjective emotional intensity.
Symbolism
Period: 1857–1900s,
mainly French
Key
Terms:
• Symbol
— An
object/word suggesting deeper meaning beyond the literal (Greek symbolon, an
object split in half).
• Correspondances
— Baudelaire's
idea of mystical links between senses and spiritual states.
• Vers
Libre — Free
verse favoured by Symbolist poets.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) — founder
of French Symbolism
-
Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) —
'Correspondances'; themes of decadence and eroticism
o
Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur
Rimbaud — leading French Symbolists
-
Mallarmé's L'Après-midi d'un faune;
Verlaine's Romances sans paroles
o
Jean Moréas — coined the term
'symbolisme'
-
Symbolist Manifesto (Le Figaro, 1886) —
attacked Realist/Naturalist and Parnassian writing
o
Arthur Symons — brought French Symbolism
to English readers
-
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
(1899), dedicated to Yeats
o
W. B. Yeats — brought Symbolism into
English verse
-
'The Symbolism of Poetry' — essay
defending symbols as evocation of the inexpressible
Expressionism
Period: 1910–1925,
Germany
Key
Terms:
• Subjective
Distortion — Reality distorted to express inner emotional
experience rather than physical fact.
• Kafkaesque
— Bizarre,
inscrutable, and oppressive quality named for Kafka's fiction.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) — philosophical
precursor
-
The Birth of Tragedy (1872) —
Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy in tragedy
o
August Strindberg — 'father of
Expressionism'
-
To Damascus (1898) — first true
Expressionist drama
o
Franz Kafka (1883–1924)
-
The Metamorphosis; The Trial; The Castle
o
Bertolt Brecht — see Marxism/Cultural
Studies section for Epic Theatre
Early
20th-century Russian schools: Formalism isolates the literary 'device';
Bakhtin's Dialogic criticism stresses the novel's plurality of voices.
Russian
Formalism
Period: 1914–1930,
Moscow & Petrograd/Prague
Key
Terms:
• Literariness
(Literaturnost) — Jakobson's term: what makes a work
specifically literary, not its content.
• Defamiliarization
(Ostranenie) — Shklovsky's term ('Art as Technique', 1917): art
makes the familiar strange to renew perception.
• Fabula
vs. Syuzhet — Raw chronological story (fabula) vs. its artistic
arrangement in the text (syuzhet).
• Skaz
— Russian
oral form of narrative (Eikhenbaum).
• Motif
(Bound/Free) — Smallest unit of plot; Tomashevsky's distinction
between fixed and freely added motifs.
• Metaphor
vs. Metonymy — Jakobson: metaphor works by similarity (vertical),
metonymy by contiguity (horizontal).
• Six
Functions of Language — Jakobson: referential, emotive, poetic,
conative, phatic, metalingual.
• Foregrounding
— Jan
Mukařovský's (Prague School) term for attention-drawing linguistic deviation.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) — founder
of OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language, 1916)
-
Art as Technique (1917) — coins
'defamiliarization'; 'the purpose of art is to make the stone stony'
o
Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) — bridge
between Formalism and Structuralism; founder of Moscow Linguistic Circle,
co-founder Prague School
-
Closing Statement: Linguistics and
Poetics (1960) — six functions of language
o
Vladimir Propp (1895–1970) — analysed
structure of folktales
-
Morphology of the Folktale (1928) — 31
narrative functions, 7 spheres of action, from 100 Russian fairy tales
o
Boris Eikhenbaum, Boris Tomashevsky, Yury
Tynyanov — OPOYAZ/Moscow Circle members
-
Eikhenbaum: 'Theory of the Formal
Method'; Tomashevsky: Theory of Literature (1925)
o
Jan Mukařovský — Prague School
-
Developed the concept of 'foregrounding'
o
Viktor Erlich, René Wellek — later
chroniclers of Formalism
-
Erlich's Russian Formalism (1955)
Dialogic
Criticism (Bakhtin)
Period: 1920s–30s
Key
Terms:
• Polyphony
— Many-voiced
quality of the novel (from music); Dostoevsky is polyphonic, Tolstoy monologic.
• Heteroglossia
— The
variety of voices/languages within a novel, reflecting social conflict.
• Carnivalesque
— Literary
mode inverting social hierarchies, drawn from folk-carnival tradition (esp.
Rabelais).
• Chronotope
— Bakhtin's
term for the fused configuration of time and space in a narrative.
• Unfinalizability
— A
person/character can never be fully known or fixed.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) — Russian
philosopher of the novel
-
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929)
— coins 'polyphony'
-
Rabelais and His World (1966) —
carnivalesque and grotesque realism
-
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
(1975) — includes 'Discourse in the Novel' and the chronotope essay
1940s–50s
criticism reading literature through recurring myths, archetypes, and the
psychology of the collective unconscious.
Myth-Archetypal
Criticism
Period: 1940s–1950s,
rooted in Jungian psychology
Key
Terms:
• Archetype
— A
recurring narrative design, image, or character type (Greek: archē = origin +
typos = pattern).
• Collective
Unconscious — Jung's shared reservoir of inherited 'primordial
images'.
• Anima/Animus
— Jung's
inner feminine (in men) and inner masculine (in women).
• Persona/Shadow
— The
image presented to the world vs. the hidden, darker self.
• Monomyth
— Joseph
Campbell's universal 'hero's journey' pattern (borrowed from Joyce's Finnegans
Wake).
• Mythoi
and the Seasons — Frye's four plot-types matched to
seasons: Comedy=Spring, Romance=Summer, Tragedy=Autumn, Satire=Winter.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Carl Jung (1875–1961) — Swiss
psychiatrist, theorist of archetypes
-
Man and His Symbols (1964) — his last
work; concept of collective unconscious first appeared 1916
o
Sir James Frazer (Scottish
anthropologist)
-
The Golden Bough (1911–15, 12 vols.) —
death-rebirth myth as 'archetype of archetypes'
o
Maud Bodkin — first to apply Jungian
theory to literature
-
Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934)
o
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) — Canadian
myth critic
-
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
— theories of Modes, Symbols, Myths, Genres; the cycle of Mythoi
-
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature
(1982) — his magnum opus
o
Joseph Campbell — American mythologist
-
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) —
the 'monomyth', 8 steps of the hero's journey
o
G. Wilson Knight — Shakespearean
myth-critic
-
The Wheel of Fire (1949) — de-emphasizes
character to reveal Shakespeare's deeper patterns
o
Annis Pratt
-
Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction
(1981)
Mid-20th-century
formalism: the poem as a self-sufficient 'verbal icon' analysed through close reading.
New
Criticism
Period: 1940s–50s,
term from J. E. Spingarn (1910), the movement named by John Crowe Ransom (1941)
Key
Terms:
• Close
Reading (Explication de texte) — Minute analysis of a text's
language, form, and structure.
• Intentional
Fallacy — Wimsatt
& Beardsley: error of judging a work by the author's presumed intention.
• Affective
Fallacy — Wimsatt
& Beardsley: error of judging a work by its effect on the reader.
• Heresy
of Paraphrase — Cleanth Brooks: a poem's meaning cannot be restated
in plain prose.
• Verbal
Icon — Wimsatt's
term for the poem as an autonomous, self-contained object.
• Tension
— Allen
Tate's term for the balance of extension (denotation) and intension
(connotation) in a poem.
• Objective
Correlative — T. S. Eliot: a set of objects/events that evoke an
emotion precisely, without direct statement.
• Impersonality
Theory — Eliot:
the poet must escape personality; 'poetry is not the expression but an escape
from emotion'.
• Unification/Dissociation
of Sensibility — Eliot: Metaphysical poets fused thought
and feeling; later poets 'dissociated' them.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
T. E. Hulme — 'father of imagism', laid
foundations of New Criticism
-
Speculations (1936, posthumous)
o
John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974) — named
the movement
-
The New Criticism (1941); Criticism,
Inc. (1937) — calls for scientific rigor in criticism
o
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) — Nobel laureate
poet-critic
-
Tradition and the Individual Talent
(1919) — 'no poet has his complete meaning alone'; theory of Impersonality
-
Hamlet and His Problems — coins
'objective correlative'; calls Hamlet 'the Mona Lisa of literature'
-
The Metaphysical Poets (1921) —
unification vs. dissociation of sensibility
o
I. A. Richards (1893–1979) — 'Father of
New Criticism'
-
Practical Criticism (1929) —
anonymous-poem experiment with students ('protocols')
-
The Meaning of Meaning (1923, with C. K.
Ogden) — referential vs. emotive language; coined Tenor/Vehicle for metaphor
o
William Empson (1906–1984) — student of
Richards
-
Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) —
catalogues seven kinds of productive poetic ambiguity
o
Cleanth Brooks (1906–1994)
-
The Well Wrought Urn (1947) — 'the
language of poetry is the language of paradox'; 'Heresy of Paraphrase'
o
W. K. Wimsatt & Monroe Beardsley —
co-authors of New Criticism's key 'fallacies'
-
The Verbal Icon (1954) — 'The
Intentional Fallacy' and 'The Affective Fallacy'
o
Allen Tate — coined 'Tension'
-
Reason in Madness
o
F. R. Leavis (1895–1978) — British
moralist-critic
-
New Bearings in English Poetry (1932);
Revaluation (1936)
-
The Great Tradition (1948) — canonises 8
novelists: Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad (British) + Poe, Hawthorne, Melville
(American)
-
Founded Scrutiny magazine
o
R. P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, Mark
Schorer — associated American New Critics
-
Schorer's 'Fiction and the Analogical
Matrix' (1949) extended close reading to prose fiction
o
Fugitive Group / Southern Agrarians
-
Ransom, Brooks, Tate, Warren, Davidson —
gathered at Vanderbilt in the 1920s, edited The Fugitive and Kenyon Review
The
Chicago School (Neo-Aristotelian Criticism)
Period: Late
1930s–1950s
Key
Terms:
• Pluralism
— Belief
that multiple valid critical methods can coexist.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
R. S. Crane — founder of the Chicago
School
-
Critics and Criticism: Ancient and
Modern (1952)
o
Wayne C. Booth — extended
Neo-Aristotelian method to fiction
-
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) — coins
'Implied Reader' and 'Unreliable Narrator'
1950s–70s
language-centred theories seeking the underlying systems and sign-relations
that generate meaning.
Structuralism
Period: 1950s–70s,
began in Paris
Key
Terms:
• Langue
vs. Parole — The abstract language system (langue) vs. an
individual utterance (parole).
• Signifier/Signified
— Saussure's
sign made of the sound-image (signifier) and concept (signified).
• Arbitrariness
of the Sign — No natural connection between signifier and
signified.
• Binary
Opposition — Meaning generated through paired contrasts (e.g.,
raw/cooked).
• Synchronic
vs. Diachronic — Studying language at one moment vs.
across historical change.
• Bricolage
— Lévi-Strauss:
constructing meaning from whatever materials are at hand.
• Function
— Propp's
term for a recurring action performed by a folktale character.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) —
'father of modern linguistics' (Culler)
-
Course in General Linguistics (1916,
posthumous) — sign, langue/parole, arbitrariness
o
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) —
structural anthropologist of myth
-
Structural Anthropology (1958); The
Savage Mind (1962) — bricolage vs. the Engineer
-
Mythologiques I–IV (1964–71) — The Raw
and the Cooked, etc.
o
Gérard Genette — theorist of narrative
discourse
-
Narrative Discourse (1972) —
Story/Narrative/Narrating; focalization (internal/external/zero); introduces
'paratext' and 'hypotext'
o
Tzvetan Todorov — Bulgarian
structuralist narratologist
-
Grammar of the Decameron (1969) — coined
'narratology'; The Fantastic (1970) — reader hesitation defines the genre
o
A. J. Greimas — structural semanticist
-
Structural Semantics (1966)
o
Noam Chomsky — American linguist
-
Syntactic Structures (1957) —
Transformational Generative Grammar; concepts of Language Acquisition Device,
Universal Grammar, competence vs. performance
o
Jonathan Culler
-
Structuralist Poetics (1975) — aims 'to
construct a Poetics which stands to Literature as Linguistics stands to
Language'
Semiotics
Period: 1900s–present
Key
Terms:
• Sign
— Anything
standing for something else to an interpreting mind.
• Icon/Index/Symbol
— Peirce's
three sign-types: resemblance, causal link, arbitrary convention.
• Denotation/Connotation
— Barthes:
literal meaning vs. culturally attached meaning of a sign.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Charles Sanders Peirce — American
founder of semiotics ('father of pragmatism')
-
Developed the triadic sign: symbol,
icon, index
o
Umberto Eco — novelist-semiotician
-
A Theory of Semiotics (1976); The Role
of the Reader (1979) — the 'open work'
Post-1966
theories destabilising structuralism's fixed systems, exposing the instability
and power-effects of language.
Deconstruction
(Derrida)
Period: 1960s–70s,
France
Key
Terms:
• Différance
— Derrida's
coinage: meaning is endlessly deferred and produced through difference.
• Logocentrism
— Western
philosophy's bias toward the 'metaphysics of presence' (a phrase from
Heidegger).
• Phonocentrism
— Privileging
speech (presence) over writing (absence).
• Arche-writing
— Derrida's
term re-orienting the speech/writing relationship.
• Aporia
— An
irresolvable contradiction or 'double bind' a text's logic runs into.
• Polysemy
— A
sign's capacity to carry multiple related meanings.
• Trace
— The
absent mark of other signs haunting any sign's meaning.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) — founder of
deconstruction, born in Algeria
-
'Structure, Sign, and Play' (1966
lecture) — early challenge to Structuralism
-
Of Grammatology (1967) — critiques
logocentrism; 'il n'y a pas de hors-texte' (there is nothing outside the text);
translated by Gayatri Spivak
-
Writing and Difference (1967);
Dissemination (1972); Specters of Marx (1994)
Roland
Barthes & Post-Structuralist Semiology
Period: 1950s–80s
Key
Terms:
• Death
of the Author — Barthes: meaning is created by the reader, not fixed
by authorial intent.
• Readerly
vs. Writerly Text — Barthes (S/Z): passive-consumption texts
vs. texts demanding active reader production.
• Five
Codes (S/Z) — Hermeneutic, Proairetic, Semantic, Symbolic,
Cultural — Barthes's codes for reading narrative.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Roland Barthes (1915–1980) — French
semiotician/critic
-
Mythologies (1957) — decodes bourgeois
cultural myths as signs
-
The Death of the Author (1967) — 'the
birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author
-
S/Z (1970) —
structuralist/deconstructive dissection of Balzac's Sarrasine into 5 codes
-
From Work to Text (1971);
-
The Pleasure of the Text (1973)
-
Image–Music–Text (1977)
Foucault,
Baudrillard & Related Post-Structuralists
Period: 1960s–90s
Key
Terms:
• Discourse
— Foucault:
systems of statements/knowledge that produce power and 'truth'.
• Power/Knowledge
— Power
and knowledge are mutually constitutive, not opposites.
• Panopticon
— Foucault's
metaphor (from Bentham) for internalised surveillance in modern society.
• Simulacra/
Simulacrum/ Hyperreality — Baudrillard's terms for copies without
originals and reality replaced by simulation.
• Rhizome
— Deleuze
&Guattari's non-linear, non-hierarchical model of thought/culture.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) —
philosopher-historian of power and discourse
-
Madness and Civilization (1961);
-
The Order of Things (1966)
-
Discipline and Punish (1975) — the
Panopticon and disciplinary power
-
The History of Sexuality (1976–2018, 4
vols.) — power produces, not just represses, sexuality
o
Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) — theorist
of media and simulation, 'high priest of postmodernism'
-
Simulacra and Simulation (1985) —
Disneyland as hyperreality
o
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
-
Anti-Oedipus (1972); A Thousand Plateaus
(1980) — 'desiring machines', rhizome, 'body without organs'
o
Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey
Hartman, Harold Bloom, Barbara Johnson — 'Yale School' of deconstruction
-
de Man: Blindness and Insight (1971);
Allegories of Reading (1979)
-
Miller: 'The Critic as Host' — 'all
reading is necessarily misreading'
Applies
theories of the unconscious mind to authors, characters, readers, and texts.
Psychoanalytic
Criticism
Period: 1900–present
Key
Terms:
• Id/Ego/Superego
— Freud's
tripartite model of the psyche (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920).
• Oedipus/Electra
Complex — Repressed
desire for the opposite-sex parent; Electra complex named by Jung (1913), Freud
rejected the term.
• Dream-work
— Freud:
the unconscious process (condensation, displacement) that creates dream
imagery.
• Mirror
Stage — Lacan:
the infant's formative (mis)recognition of a unified self in a mirror.
• Symbolic/Imaginary/Real
— Lacan's
three psychic orders (RSI).
• The
Unconscious is Structured Like a Language — Lacan's central
claim, reinterpreting Freud via Saussure.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) — founder of
psychoanalysis
-
The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) —
'dream is the royal road to the unconscious'
-
The Ego and the Id (1923) — full
elaboration of Id/Ego/Superego
o
Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) —
reinterpreted Freud through structural linguistics
-
Écrits — Mirror Stage; RSI orders
o
Carl Jung — see Myth-Archetypal
Criticism section
o
Ernest Jones — Freud's colleague, applied
psychoanalysis to Shakespeare
-
Hamlet and Oedipus (1897)
Reads
literature/culture through class struggle, ideology, hegemony, and — later —
the everyday practices of mass and popular culture.
Marxist
Criticism
Period: 1920s–present
Key
Terms:
• Base
and Superstructure — Economic 'base' shapes the
cultural/ideological 'superstructure'.
• Ideology
— Engels:
'false consciousness' — beliefs that naturalise existing power relations.
• Hegemony
— Gramsci:
rule maintained through cultural consent, not just force.
• Subaltern
— Gramsci's
term (later developed by Spivak) for socially excluded, exploited groups.
• Reification
— Lukács:
the 'thingification' of social relations under capitalism.
• Interpellation
— Althusser:
how ideology 'hails' individuals into subject-positions.
• Ideological/Repressive
State Apparatuses (ISA/RSA) — Althusser: institutions (school,
media, family) vs. coercive institutions (army, police, law) that sustain
ideology.
• Dominant/Residual/Emergent
Ideology — Raymond Williams's three-part model of ideological
change.
• Cultural
Materialism — Williams's British approach reading texts as engaged
in present political struggle.
• Structure
of Feeling — Williams's term for a period's not-yet-fully-articulated
shared experience.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels —
founders of Marxist theory
-
The German Ideology (1846); The
Communist Manifesto (1848); Das Kapital (1867)
-
Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State (1884, Engels) — basis of Marxist feminism
o
György Lukács (1885–1971) — Hungarian
critic, defended 19th-c. realism against Modernism
-
The Theory of the Novel (1971); History
and Class Consciousness (1923) — concept of Reification
o
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) — Italian
Marxist, coined 'hegemony' and 'subaltern'
-
Prison Notebooks
o
Louis Althusser (1918–1990) —
structuralist Marxist
-
Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses (1969) — ISA/RSA, interpellation
o
Raymond Williams (1921–1988) — founder
of Cultural Materialism and Cultural Studies
-
Culture and Society (1958); The Long
Revolution (1961); Keywords (1976); Marxism and Literature (1977)
o
Terry Eagleton — leading British Marxist
theorist
-
Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983);
Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976); Why Marx Was Right (2011)
o
Fredric Jameson — American Marxist
theorist of postmodernity
-
Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (1991); The Political Unconscious (1981)
o
Laclau&Mouffe — post-Marxist
political theorists
-
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985)
The
Frankfurt School
Period: 1920s–60s,
Germany
Key
Terms:
• Culture
Industry — Frankfurt School critique of mass-produced,
standardised commercial culture.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer
-
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
-
Culture Industry term
o
Walter Benjamin
-
'The Author as Producer' (1934)
-
“The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” (1935/1936)
o
Herbert Marcuse
-
Critiqued modern mass culture's bland
commercialism
Epic
Theatre (Brecht)
Period: Early–mid
20th century
Key
Terms:
• Verfremdungseffekt
(Alienation Effect) — Brecht's technique (from Shklovsky's
defamiliarization) to prevent emotional identification and provoke critical
thought.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) — German
theatre practitioner
-
Mother Courage and Her Children; The
Caucasian Chalk Circle; A Short Organum for the Theatre (1951)
Cultural
Studies
Period: 1950s–present,
Birmingham School onward
Key
Terms:
• Encoding/Decoding
— Stuart
Hall's model of how media messages are produced and variously read (dominant,
negotiated, oppositional).
• Subcultural
Resistance — Dick Hebdige's concept of style as symbolic
resistance (e.g., punk).
• Culture as a “Whole Way of Life” — Raymond Williams’s idea that culture includes everyday practices, values, beliefs, institutions, and forms of expression, not merely “high art.”
• Popular Culture — Cultural forms produced, circulated, and consumed by large sections of society, including television, music, films, sports, advertisements, and popular literature.
• Mass Culture — Cultural products created for large-scale consumption, often associated with industrial production and commercial entertainment.
• High Culture / Low Culture — The traditional distinction between elite artistic forms and popular or mass cultural forms, challenged by Cultural Studies.
• Unhomely — Bhabha’s term describing the unsettling experience of being caught between cultures and identities.
• Cultural Imperialism — The domination or influence of one culture over another, particularly through media, language, education, and cultural industries.
• The Male Gaze — Laura Mulvey’s concept describing the representation of women in visual culture from a masculine, heterosexual perspective.
• Simulacra / Simulation — Jean Baudrillard’s concepts describing representations that increasingly replace or blur distinctions between reality and representation.
• Articulation — Stuart Hall’s concept describing how cultural elements, identities, and social forces are temporarily connected to one another.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Richard Hoggart — founder of the
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1964)
-
The Uses of Literacy (1958)
-
Studied working-class culture and
popular culture.
-
Challenged the division between “high”
and “low” culture.
o
Stuart Hall (1932–2014) —
Jamaican-British cultural theorist
-
'Encoding/Decoding in the Television
Discourse' (1973)
-
“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990)
-
“The Work of Representation” (1997)
-
Director of the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (1968–1979).
o
Dick Hebdige
-
Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979)
-
Key concepts: subculture, bricolage,
style as resistance.
-
Famous for his analysis of punk culture.
o
Raymond
Williams (1921–1988)
-
Culture and Society (1958)
-
The Long Revolution (1961)
-
Keywords (1976)
-
Marxism and Literature (1977)
-
Major concepts: culture as a whole way
of life, cultural materialism, structure of feeling.
-
One of the principal founders of British
Cultural Studies.
o
E. P.
Thompson (1924–1993)
-
The Making of the English Working Class
(1963)
o
Laura
Mulvey (1941– )
-
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
(1975)
-
Key concept: Male Gaze
o
Kimberlé
Crenshaw (1959– )
-
“Demarginalizing the Intersection of
Race and Sex” (1989)
-
“Mapping the Margins” (1991)
-
Key concept: Intersectionality.
o
Angela
McRobbie (1951– )
-
Feminism and Youth Culture (1991)
o
John
Fiske (1939–2021)
-
Television Culture (1987)
-
Understanding Popular Culture (1989)
1980s
reading of literary texts alongside non-literary/historical documents as
equally constructed sites of power negotiation.
New
Historicism / Cultural Poetics (USA) & Cultural Materialism (UK)
Period: 1980s–present
Key
Terms:
• Co-text
— Greenblatt's
replacement for 'context': non-literary text read in parallel with the
literary.
• Circulation
of Social Energy — Greenblatt's idea that cultural power
moves fluidly between literary and social spheres.
• Self-Fashioning
— Greenblatt's
term for Renaissance authors constructing identities per social/political
codes.
• Thick
Description — Clifford Geertz's method of richly contextualising
cultural practices before interpreting them.
• Resonance
and Wonder — Greenblatt's terms for a displayed object's reach
beyond its formal boundaries, and its power to arrest attention.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943) — founder
of New Historicism, coined the term (1982)
-
Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980);
Shakespearean Negotiations (1978); Practicing New Historicism (2000)
o
Clifford Geertz — anthropologist whose
method influenced New Historicism
-
The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) —
'thick description'
o
Jonathan Dollimore & Alan Sinfield —
British Cultural Materialists
-
Political Shakespeare: New Essays in
Cultural Materialism (1985)
o
Louis Montrose, Jerome McGann — New
Historicist critics of Renaissance and Romantic literature respectively
-
McGann's The Romantic Ideology (1985)
1960s–80s
theories shifting the source of literary meaning from text/author to the
active, meaning-making reader.
Reader-Response
Theory
Period: 1960s–1980s,
US/Germany
Key
Terms:
• Horizon
of Expectations — Jauss's term for the historically shaped
expectations readers bring to a text.
• Implied
Reader — Iser/Booth's
construct of the reader-role a text invites the actual reader to inhabit.
• Interpretive
Communities — Fish's idea that shared reading conventions, not the
text alone, generate meaning.
• Textual
Gaps (Leerstellen) — Iser: blanks in a text the reader must
imaginatively fill.
• Transactional
Theory — Rosenblatt's
model of reading as a two-way transaction.
• Affective
Stylistics — Fish: text has meaning only as an event occurring in
time as it's read.
• Unreliable
Narrator — Booth's term for a narrator whose account the reader
cannot fully trust.
• Anxiety
of Influence — Harold Bloom: every strong poet must 'misread'/rebel
against a precursor poet.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Louise Rosenblatt — pioneer of
transactional reading theory
-
Literature as Exploration (1938); The
Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978)
o
Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007) — co-founder
of the Constance School
-
The Implied Reader (1972); The Act of
Reading (1976) — artistic pole (author) vs. aesthetic pole (reader)
o
Hans Robert Jauss — co-founder of the
Constance School
-
Toward an Aesthetic of Reception —
'Horizon of Expectations'; Reception Theory
o
Stanley Fish — theorist of interpretive
communities
-
Is There a Text in This Class? (1980);
Surprised by Sin (1967, on Paradise Lost)
o
Wayne C. Booth — Chicago School, coined
key narrative terms
-
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) — Implied
Reader, Unreliable Narrator
o
Harold Bloom — theorist of poetic
influence
-
The Anxiety of Influence (1973); Map of
Misreading (1975)
o
Norman Holland, Stuart Hall (reception)
-
Holland: The Dynamics of Literary
Response (1965)
Philosophy-of-language
approach treating utterances — including literary ones — as actions performed
through language.
Speech
Act Theory
Period: 1955–present
Key
Terms:
• Locutionary
Act — The
literal act of producing a meaningful utterance.
• Illocutionary
Act — What
is done in saying something — promising, warning, asserting.
• Perlocutionary
Act — The
effect of an utterance on the listener's feelings/actions.
• Constative
vs. Performative — Austin: statements that describe
(true/false) vs. utterances that perform an act (e.g., promising).
• Contact
Zone — Mary
Louise Pratt's term for the space where disparate cultures clash/grapple (also
a postcolonial term).
Critics
& Key Works:
o
J. L. Austin (1911–1960) — Oxford
philosopher, founder of speech act theory
-
How to Do Things with Words (1962)
o
John Searle — extended and systematised
speech act theory
-
Speech Acts (1969) — five illocutionary
types: assertive, commissive, directive, declaratory, expressive
o
H. P. Grice
-
'Logic and Conversation' (1975)
o
Ludwig Wittgenstein
-
Philosophical Investigations (1953) —
language as a 'toolbox'
o
Mary Louise Pratt — applied speech act
theory to literature
-
Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary
Discourse (1977)
Continental-philosophy-based
approaches: existentialism confronts freedom and absurdity; phenomenology and
hermeneutics theorise consciousness and interpretation.
Existentialism
Period: 1940s–1960s
Key
Terms:
• Existence
Precedes Essence — Sartre: humans first exist, then define
themselves through free choices.
• The
Absurd — Camus:
conflict between humans' search for meaning and the universe's silence.
• Bad
Faith — Sartre:
self-deceptive denial of one's own freedom and responsibility.
• Dasein
/ Being-toward-death — Heidegger: human existence as
'being-in-the-world', confronting mortality.
• Leap
of Faith — Kierkegaard: the non-rational commitment beyond
ethical reasoning.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) —
philosopher-novelist of radical freedom
-
Being and Nothingness; What Is
Literature?; No Exit ('Hell is other people')
o
Albert Camus — theorist of the Absurd
-
The Myth of Sisyphus; The Stranger
o
Martin Heidegger — ontological
philosopher
-
Being and Time (1927)
o
Søren Kierkegaard — proto-existentialist
philosopher
-
Fear and Trembling (1843)
Phenomenology
& Hermeneutics
Period: 19th
c.–present
Key
Terms:
• Intentionality
— Consciousness
is always consciousness 'of' something.
• Hermeneutic
Circle — Understanding
a text's parts requires grasping the whole, and vice versa.
• Fusion
of Horizons — Gadamer: interpretation merges the reader's and the
text's historical horizons.
• Prejudice/Pre-understanding
— Gadamer:
the interpreter's historically conditioned starting point, productive rather
than merely an obstacle.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Edmund Husserl — founder of
phenomenology
-
Ideas — intentionality, 'bracketing'
(epoché)
o
Hans-Georg Gadamer — major hermeneutic
philosopher
-
Truth and Method — 'fusion of horizons';
basis of Jauss's Reception Theory
o
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm
Dilthey — founders of general hermeneutics
-
Schleiermacher: reconstructing authorial
intention; Dilthey: 'Verstehen' (understanding) vs. natural-science explanation
From
18th-century precursors through four 'waves' and many schools (French, Marxist,
ecofeminist, Black/womanist) examining gender, patriarchy, and women's writing.
Waves
& Precursors
Period: 1700s–present
Key
Terms:
• Patriarchy
— Virginia
Woolf's term ('rule of the father') for male-dominated social structure.
• Feminism
(etymology) — From French 'féminisme', coined by utopian socialist
Charles Fourier; first used in English in the 1890s.
• Sex
vs. Gender — Biologically determined reproductive parts vs.
socially constructed masculine/feminine roles.
• Androgyny
— Coleridge's
term for a mind combining male and female understanding, used by Woolf in A
Room of One's Own.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Christine de Pizan (1365–1429) — 'first
woman to take up her pen in defence of sex' (Beauvoir)
-
The Book of the City of Ladies
o
Mary Astell (1666–1731)
-
A Serious Proposal to the Ladies
(1694/97)
o
Mary Wollstonecraft — 'Grandmother of
British Feminism'
-
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792)
o
John Stuart Mill
-
The Subjection of Women (1869)
o
Sojourner Truth — abolitionist, women's
rights activist
-
'Ain't I a Woman' (speech, 1851)
o
1st Wave (1700s–1900s)
-
Suffrage movement — Anne Bradstreet,
Aphra Behn
o
2nd Wave (1960s–WWII era,
'Gynocriticism')
-
Reproductive rights, workplace
discrimination; exposed phallocentrism and sexism
o
3rd Wave (1990s–2008)
-
Post-structuralist interpretations;
Rebecca Walker's 'Becoming the Third Wave' (1992)
o
4th Wave (2008–present)
-
Technology-connected activism; Kira
Cochrane's 'All the Rebel Women'
Anglo-American
Feminist Criticism / Gynocriticism
Period: 1929–present
Key
Terms:
• Gynocriticism
— Showalter's
term for criticism focused on women as writers, not just as represented
subjects.
• The
Male Gaze — Media/narrative positioning the viewer in a
masculine, objectifying viewpoint.
• Angel
in the House — Victorian ideal of the submissive domestic woman,
critiqued by Woolf.
• Three
Phases of Women's Writing — Showalter: Feminine (imitation,
1840–80), Feminist (protest, 1880–1920), Female (self-discovery, 1920–).
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
-
A Room of One's Own (1929) — women need
money and a room to write; uses Coleridge's 'Androgyny'
o
Elaine Showalter — chief exponent of
Gynocriticism
-
A Literature of Their Own (1977);
'Towards a Feminist Poetics' (1979) — coins Gynocriticism
o
Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar
-
The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) —
Bertha Rochester as figure of repressed female rage
o
Mary Ellmann
-
Thinking About Women (1968) — began
American feminist criticism
Political,
Materialist & Marxist Feminism
Period: 1960s–70s
Key
Terms:
• Sexual
Politics — Millett's term for patriarchy as a political system
embedded in literature.
• Double
Burden / Second Shift — The unpaid domestic workload borne
alongside paid employment.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Kate Millett — launched political
feminism
-
Sexual Politics (1970) — 'first book of
academic feminist literary criticism'
o
Simone de Beauvoir — French Materialist
feminist
-
The Second Sex (1949) — 'One is not
born, but rather becomes, a woman'
o
Betty Friedan
-
The Feminine Mystique (1963) — sparked
American second-wave feminism
o
Shulamith Firestone
-
The Dialectic of Sex (1970)
o
Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin —
French materialist feminists
-
Delphy: marriage as an unpaid labour
contract
French
Psychoanalytic Feminism
Period: 1970s–present
Key
Terms:
• ÉcritureFéminine
— Cixous's
concept of a distinctly feminine mode of writing the body.
• Phallocentric
/ Phallogocentric — Male-centred and male-word-centred
culture (terms from Ernest Jones and Derrida).
• Semiotic
vs. Symbolic — Kristeva's pre-linguistic maternal register vs. the
paternal order of language.
• Intertextuality
— Kristeva's
term (from Bakhtin's dialogism): texts are woven from other texts.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Julia Kristeva — Bulgarian-French
philosopher
-
Revolution in Poetic Language (1974);
coined 'intertextuality' and 'abjection' (Powers of Horror, 1980)
o
Hélène Cixous
-
The Laugh of the Medusa (1976) —
manifesto of écritureféminine
o
Luce Irigaray
-
Speculum of the Other Woman (1974); This
Sex Which Is Not One (1977)
o
Monique Wittig — radical lesbian
theorist
-
'One Is Not Born a Woman' (1981) — gender
as social construction
Black
Feminism, Ecofeminism & Global Feminisms
Period: 1970s–present
Key
Terms:
• Womanism
— Alice
Walker's term ('Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender').
• Intersectionality
— Kimberlé
Crenshaw's term (1989) for interlocking race, class, gender oppression.
• Ecofeminism
— Françoise
d'Eaubonne's term linking domination of nature to domination of women.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins)
-
Ain't I a Woman (1981); Feminist Theory:
From Margin to Center (1984)
o
Alice Walker
-
The Color Purple (1982, Pulitzer) —
coined 'womanist'
o
Adrienne Rich
-
Of Woman Born (1976); 'Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence' (1980)
o
Vandana Shiva, Annette Kolodny —
ecofeminist critics
-
Kolodny: The Lay of the Land (1975)
Gender
Theory
Period: 1990–present
Key
Terms:
• Gender
Performativity — Judith Butler's term: gender is produced
through repeated stylised acts.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Judith Butler
-
Gender Trouble (1990) — 'Gender is not
to culture as sex is to nature'
-
Bodies That Matter (1993)
Theories
examining sexuality, gender identity as construct, and the
representation/erasure of queer experience.
Queer
Theory
Period: 1980s–present
Key
Terms:
• Heteronormativity
— The
assumption that heterosexuality is the natural default.
• Compulsory
Heterosexuality — Rich's term for the social enforcement
of heterosexuality.
• The
Closet — Sedgwick's
metaphor for concealment/disclosure of gay identity.
• Homosocial
Desire — Sedgwick's
term for intense same-sex bonds structuring patriarchal power.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Michel Foucault — historicised sexuality
as discursively produced
-
The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 — 'the
homosexual' as a modern discursive category
o
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
-
Epistemology of the Closet; Between Men
(homosocial desire)
o
Judith Butler — see Feminist Criticism
section
o
Adrienne Rich — see Feminist Criticism
section
Examines
literature and culture in relation to colonialism, empire, decolonisation, and
their lasting aftermath.
Postcolonial
Theory
Period: 1950s–present
Key
Terms:
• Orientalism
— Said:
the West's power-laden, stereotyped construction of 'the East'.
• Subaltern
— Gramsci's
term, developed by Spivak, for socially excluded groups unable to be heard.
• Hybridity
/ Mimicry / Ambivalence / Third Space — Bhabha's terms
for blended colonial identities, partial imitation, mixed attraction-repulsion,
and the in-between space of negotiated meaning.
• Othering
— Spivak:
the process by which imperial discourse creates its inferior 'Others'.
• Négritude
— Césaire's
movement affirming shared Black cultural identity and pride.
• Contrapuntal
Reading — Said's
method of reading English texts to reveal their implication in imperialism.
• Contact
Zone — Mary
Louise Pratt: social space where disparate cultures clash and grapple.
• Abrogation
/ Appropriation — Rejecting the coloniser's 'standard'
language vs. adapting it for one's own use.
• Magic
Realism — Realistic
fiction interwoven with matter-of-fact magical elements (Rushdie, Marquez).
• Diaspora
— Dispersal
of a people from their homeland; 'ex-colonials by birth, cosmopolitan in
interest' (Boehmer).
• Epistemic
Violence / Strategic Essentialism / Worlding — Spivak's terms
for the silencing of marginalised knowledge, temporary group unity for
political goals, and colonised space made to 'exist' via Euro-centrism.
• Imagined
Communities — Benedict Anderson's term for nations as socially
constructed communities enabled by print capitalism.
• Double
Consciousness — W. E. B. Du Bois's term for the dual
identity/oppression experienced by Black Americans.
• Neo-colonialism
— Kwame
Nkrumah's term for continued control of ex-colonies after political
independence.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) —
psychiatrist-theorist of colonial violence and identity
-
Black Skin, White Masks (1952) —
psychology of racism and colonial domination
-
The Wretched of the Earth (1961, preface
by Sartre) — anti-colonial revolutionary violence
o
Edward Said (1935–2003) — 'father of
postcolonial theory'
-
Orientalism (1978) — foundational text
on the West's discursive construction of 'the Orient'
-
Culture and Imperialism (1993) —
'contrapuntal reading'
o
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942) —
'practical Marxist feminist deconstructionist'
-
'Can the Subaltern Speak?' (1988) —
questions whether subaltern voices can be represented
-
Translated Derrida's Of Grammatology
into English
o
Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) — 'best known
colonial discourse theorist'
-
The Location of Culture; Nation and
Narration (1990) — hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence
o
Aimé Césaire — founder of the Négritude
movement
-
Discourse on Colonialism (1950); Une
Tempête (1969) — postcolonial retelling of The Tempest
o
Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léon-Gontran
Damas — fellow Négritude founders
-
Senghor: first President of Senegal
o
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o — Kenyan
novelist-critic
-
Decolonising the Mind (1986) — advocates
African-language writing over English
o
Chinua Achebe — critic of colonial
literary representation
-
'An Image of Africa' — condemns Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
o
Henry Louis Gates Jr. — African-American
theorist of signifying
-
The Signifying Monkey (1988) — analyses
African-American 'signifying' tradition
o
Salman Rushdie
-
Imaginary Homelands (1991); coined
discussion of Commonwealth Literature and magic realism (Midnight's Children)
o
Benedict Anderson
-
Imagined Communities (1983)
o
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths &
Helen Tiffin
-
The Empire Writes Back (1989) — first
major theoretical survey of postcolonial literatures
o
W. E. B. Du Bois
-
The Souls of Black Folk (1903) — 'double
consciousness'
o
V. S. Naipaul
-
An Area of Darkness (1964) — travelogue
on India
A
distinct critical tradition tracing Shakespeare's reception from contemporaries
to psychoanalytic, mythic, and postcolonial readings.
Landmark
Shakespearean Critics
Period: 17th
century–present
Key
Terms:
• Bowdlerise
— To
censor a text for propriety, from Thomas Bowdler's expurgated Family
Shakespeare.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
A. C. Bradley — most influential
psychological/philosophical Shakespearean critic
-
Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) — lectures
on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth; tragic heroes are of 'high rank' with
an 'extraordinary nature'
o
L. C. Knights — countered Bradley's
character-based approach
-
'How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?'
(1933)
o
G. Wilson Knight, Northrop Frye, Jan
Kott — myth/structural/existentialist readings
-
Kott: Shakespeare Our Contemporary
(1961)
o
Harold Bloom
-
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
(1998)
o
Sigmund Freud & Ernest Jones —
psychoanalytic readings
-
Freud on Hamlet's Oedipus complex;
Jones's Hamlet and Oedipus (1897)
o
Edward Said — postcolonial reading
-
Reads The Tempest: Prospero as
coloniser, Caliban as colonised, in Orientalism
o
Stephen Greenblatt — New Historicist
reading
-
Will in the World (2005) — biography;
general editor, The Norton Shakespeare
Newest
strands addressing environment, translation, the posthuman, disability, trauma,
and world literature.
Ecocriticism
Period: 1990s–present
Key
Terms:
• Anthropocene
— Proposed
epoch defined by decisive human impact on Earth's systems.
• Deep
Ecology — Philosophy
valuing all living things intrinsically.
• Ecofeminism
— See
Feminist Criticism section — links domination of nature and women.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Cheryll Glotfelty — co-founder of
ecocriticism as a field
-
The Ecocriticism Reader (1996, with
Harold Fromm)
o
Lawrence Buell
-
The Environmental Imagination (1995)
Translation
Studies
Period: 18th
century–present
Key
Terms:
• Skopos
Theory — Hans
J. Vermeer's functional approach: translation should serve the target
audience's purpose (Greek skopos = purpose).
• Creative
Transposition — Roman Jakobson: translation is creative
transformation, not exact equivalence.
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Sir William Jones — pioneering Sanskrit
translator
-
Translated Kalidasa's Abhijnana
Shakuntala (1789)
o
Edward Fitzgerald
-
Translated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
o
A. K. Ramanujan — Indian translator-poet
-
Speaking of Shiva; Samskara
Posthumanism,
Trauma, Disability & World Literature
Period: 1990s–present
Key
Terms:
• Thing
Theory — Bill
Brown's branch of criticism on human–object interactions (from Heidegger).
• Habitus
/ Cultural Capital — Pierre Bourdieu's sociological terms for
embodied dispositions and non-economic social assets.
• Third-World
Literature — Fredric Jameson's controversial 1986 essay proposing
a shared 'national allegory' logic for Global South writing.
• Medium
theory-
Medium is the message- Coined by Marshall McLuhan
• Stanger King Theory- conflict-ridden
societies willingly accept an outside ruler as a neutral authority to bring
internal peace, though this outsider eventually consolidates total power.
Developed by Marshall Sahlins
• Digital Humanities & Computational
Criticism:
Employs Distant Reading and Cybertext to analyze large literary trends using
data algorithms, pioneered by Franco Moretti and N. Katherine Hayles
• Affect Theory & Cognitive Poetics: Uses
The Affective Turn and Cognitive Poetics to study human emotion and neural
reading patterns, championed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Brian Massumi, and Peter
Stockwell..
Critics
& Key Works:
o
Donna Haraway
-
A Cyborg Manifesto — posthumanism
o
Pierre Bourdieu
-
Distinction; 'The Forms of Capital'
(1985)
-
Habitus /
Cultural Capital
o
Cathy Caruth — foundational trauma
theorist
-
Unclaimed Experience
o
David Damrosch
-
What Is World Literature? (2003)
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