Literary criticism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Literary critic)
Jump to navigationJump to search
For the events sanctioned by the University Interscholastic League, see Literary
Criticism (UIL).

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this
article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be
challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Literary criticism" � news � newspapers � books � scholar � JSTOR
(April 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Literature
Liji2 no bg.png
Major forms
NovelPoetryDramaShort storyNovella
Genres
AdventureComedyDramaEpicEroticNonsenseLyricMythopoeiaRomanceSatireSpeculative
fictionTragedyTragicomedy
Media
Performance PlayBooks
Techniques
ProsePoetry
History and lists
History modern
OutlineGlossary of terms
BooksWritersLiterary awards poetry
Discussion
CriticismTheory (critical theory)SociologyMagazines
Books-aj.svg aj ashton 01.svg Literature portal
vte
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 discussion of literature's goals and
methods. Though 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, or conversely from book reviewing, 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 academic journals, and more
popular critics publish their reviews in broadly circulating periodicals such as
The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review
of Books, the London Review of Books, the Dublin Review of Books, The Nation,
Bookforum, and The New Yorker.

Contents
1 History
1.1 Classical and medieval criticism
1.2 Renaissance criticism
1.3 Enlightenment criticism
1.4 19th-century Romantic criticism
1.5 The New Criticism
1.6 Theory
1.7 History of the book
1.8 Current state
2 Value of academic criticism
3 Key texts
3.1 The Classical and medieval periods
3.2 The Renaissance period
3.3 The Enlightenment period
3.4 The 19th century
3.5 The 20th century
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
History
Classical and medieval criticism
Literary criticism is thought to have existed as long as literature. 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 medieval criticism often focused on religious texts, and the
several long religious traditions of hermeneutics and textual exegesis have had a
profound influence on the study of secular texts. This was particularly the case
for the literary traditions of the three Abrahamic religions: Jewish literature,
Christian literature and Islamic literature.

Literary criticism was also employed in other forms of medieval Arabic literature
and Arabic poetry from the 9th century, notably by Al-Jahiz in his al-Bayan wa-'l-
tabyin and al-Hayawan, and by Abdullah ibn al-Mu'tazz in his Kitab al-Badi.[2]

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.

Enlightenment criticism
[icon]
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (August 2010)
In the Enlightenment period (1700s to 1800s), literary criticism became more
popular. During this time period literacy rates started to rise in the public; no
longer was reading exclusive for the wealthy or scholarly. With the rise of the
literate public and swiftness of printing, criticism arose too. Reading was no
longer viewed solely as educational or as a sacred source of religion; it was a
form of entertainment.[3] Literary criticism was influenced by the values and
stylistic writing, including clear, bold, precise writing and the more
controversial criteria of the author's religious beliefs.[4] These critical reviews
were published in many magazines, newspapers, and journals. Many works of Jonathan
Swift were criticized including his book Gulliver's Travels, which one critic
described as "the detestable story of the Yahoos".[4]

19th-century Romantic criticism

The British Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century introduced new
aesthetic ideas to literary studies, including the idea that the object of
literature need not always be beautiful, noble, or perfect, but that literature
itself could elevate a common subject to the level of the sublime. German
Romanticism, which followed closely after the late development of German
classicism, emphasized an aesthetic of fragmentation that can appear startlingly
modern to the reader of English literature, and valued Witz � that is, "wit" or
"humor" of a certain sort � more highly than the serious Anglophone Romanticism.
The late nineteenth century brought renown to authors known more for their literary
criticism than for their own literary work, such as Matthew Arnold.

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 Russian Formalism, and slightly later the New Criticism in Britain and in the
United States, came to dominate the study and discussion of literature, in the
English-speaking world. Both schools emphasized the close reading of texts,
elevating it far above generalizing discussion and speculation about either
authorial intention (to say nothing of the author's psychology or biography, which
became almost taboo subjects) or reader response. This emphasis on form and precise
attention to "the words themselves" has persisted, after the decline of these
critical doctrines themselves.

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.[5]
J�rgen 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.

History of the book

Related to other forms of literary criticism, the history of the book is a field of
interdisciplinary inquiry drawing on the methods of bibliography, cultural history,
history of literature, and media theory. Principally concerned with the production,
circulation, and reception of texts and their material forms, book history seeks to
connect forms of textuality with their material aspects.

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.

Current state
Today, approaches based in literary theory and continental philosophy largely
coexist in university literature departments, while conventional methods, some
informed by the New Critics, also remain active. Disagreements over the goals and
methods of literary criticism, which characterized both sides taken by critics
during the "rise" of theory, have declined. Many critics feel that they now have a
great plurality of methods and approaches from which to choose.[citation needed]

Some critics work largely with theoretical texts, while others read traditional
literature; interest in the literary canon is still great, but many critics are
also interested in nontraditional texts and women's literature, as elaborated on by
certain academic journals such as Contemporary Women's Writing,[6] while some
critics influenced by cultural studies read popular texts like comic books or
pulp/genre fiction. Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and the
natural sciences. Darwinian literary studies studies literature in the context of
evolutionary influences on human nature. And postcritique has sought to develop new
ways of reading and responding to literary texts that go beyond the interpretive
methods of critique. Many literary critics also work in film criticism or media
studies. Some write intellectual history; others bring the results and methods of
social history to bear on reading literature.[citation needed]

Value of academic criticism

The value of extensive literary analysis has been questioned by several prominent
artists. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote that good readers do not read books, and
particularly those which are considered to be literary masterpieces, "for the
academic purpose of indulging in generalizations".[7] Terry Eagleton attributes an
unsung stature to literary critics and to criticism in academia. He believes that
critics are not so well-known and praised, to his disappointment, and that literary
criticism is declining in its value because of the manner the general audience is
directing it towards that underappreciated state.[8] At a 1986 Copenhagen
conference of James Joyce scholars, Stephen J. Joyce (the modernist writer's
grandson) said, "If my grandfather was here, he would have died laughing ...
Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can be picked up, read, and
enjoyed by virtually anybody without scholarly guides, theories, and intricate
explanations, as can Ulysses, if you forget about all the hue and cry." He later
questioned whether anything has been added to the legacy of Joyce's art by the 261
books of literary criticism stored in the Library of Congress.[9]

Key texts
The 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 Can Grande 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
The 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
The 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-Despr�aux: 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: Laoco�n
Joshua Reynolds: Discourses on Art
Richard "Conversation" Sharp Letters & Essays in Prose & Verse
James Usher :Clio: or a Discourse on Taste (1767)[10]
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
The 19th century
William Wordsworth: Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads
Anne Louise Germaine de Sta�l: 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?
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
Karl Marx: The German Ideology, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
S�ren 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
�mile Zola: The Experimental Novel
Anatole France: The Adventures of the Soul
Oscar Wilde: The Decay of Lying
St�phane Mallarm�: The Evolution of Literature, The Book: A Spiritual Mystery,
Mystery in Literature
Leo Tolstoy: What is Art?
The 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 L�vi-Strauss: The Structural Study of Myth
T. E. Hulme: Romanticism and Classicism; 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
Gy�rgy Luk�cs: The Ideal of the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois Aesthetics; Art and
Objective Truth
Paul Val�ry: 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 Mukarovsk�: 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
Martin Heidegger: The Nature of Language; Language in the Poem; H�lderlin and 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 F�lix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Ren� Girard: The Sacrificial Crisis
H�l�ne 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
Andr� Breton: The Surrealist Manifesto; The Declaration of January 27, 1925
Mina Loy: Feminist Manifesto
Yokomitsu Riichi: Sensation and New Sensation
Oswald de Andrade: Cannibalist Manifesto
Andr� 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
Listen to this article (info/dl)
MENU0:00

This audio file was created from a revision of the article "Literary criticism"
dated 2006-10-18, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. (Audio
help)
More spoken articles
Book review
Comparative literature
Critical theory
Feminist literary criticism
Genre studies
History of the book
Literary critics
Literary translation
Philosophy and literature
Poetic tradition
Social criticism
Translation criticism
References
Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2nd ed.). Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press. 2005. ISBN 0801880106. OCLC 54374476.
van. Gelder, G. J. H. (1982). Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics
on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem. Leiden: Brill Publishers. pp. 1�2. ISBN
9004068546. OCLC 10350183.
Murray, Stuart (2009). The Library: An Illustrated History. New York: Skyhorse.
pp. 132�133. ISBN 9781616084530. OCLC 277203534.
Regan, Shaun; Dawson, Books (2013). Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-
Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Lewisburg [Pa.]: Bucknell University Press.
pp. 125�130. ISBN 9781611484786.
Jones, E. Michael (1991). Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual
Misbehaviour. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. pp. 79�84. ISBN 0898704472. OCLC
28241358.
"Contemporary Women's Writing | Oxford Academic". OUP Academic. Retrieved 2019-08-
01.
Vladimir Nabokov Lectures on Literature, chap. L'Envoi p. 381
Speirs, Logan (1986). Eagleton, Terry (ed.). "Terry Eagleton and 'The Function of
Criticism'". The Cambridge Quarterly. 15 (1): 57�63. ISSN 0008-199X. JSTOR
42966605.
D. T. Max (June 19, 2006). "The Injustice Collector". The New Yorker.
Ussher, J. (1767). Clio Or, a Discourse on Taste: Addressed to a Young Lady.
Davies. p. 3. Retrieved 2014-10-10.
External links
Library resources about
Literary Criticism
Resources in your library
Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Literary Criticism
Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism Award Winners
Internet Public Library: Literary Criticism Collection of Critical and Biographical
Websites
A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism, and Philology (University of
Zaragoza)
vte
Literary criticism
Literary theory
Archetypal criticismBiographical criticismChicago schoolCultural
materialismDarwinian criticismDeconstructionDescriptive poeticsEcocriticismFeminist
criticismFormalismGeocriticismMarxist criticismNew CriticismNew
historicismPostcolonial criticismPostcritiquePsychoanalytic criticismReader-
response criticismRussian formalismSemiotic criticismSociological criticismSource
criticismThing theory
Antique-books-woodward.jpg
Authority control Edit this at Wikidata
BNE: XX526725BNF: cb119361722 (data)GND: 4036020-9LCCN: sh85034149
Categories: Literary criticismAestheticsNew CriticismInterpretation (philosophy)
Navigation menu
Not logged inTalkContributionsCreate accountLog inArticleTalkReadEditView
historySearch
Search Wikipedia
Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikipedia store
Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page
Tools
What links here
Related changes
Upload file
Special pages
Permanent link
Page information
Wikidata item
Cite this page
In other projects
Wikimedia Commons
Print/export
Download as PDF
Printable version

Languages
???????
Deutsch
Espa�ol
Fran�ais
??????
Bahasa Indonesia
Bahasa Melayu
???????
??
60 more
Edit links
This page was last edited on 16 March 2020, at 10:01 (UTC).
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License;
additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy. Wikipedia� is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation,
Inc., a non-profit organization.