Literary Theory and Criticism

Literary theory is the systematic reflection on the nature, function and methods of literature and its study. Literary criticism is its applied practice — the close analysis of texts.

Classical and early modern poetics

• Aristotle — Poetics (c. 335 BCE): tragedy as imitation (mimesis); plot, character, catharsis, hamartia, unity of action.
• Horace — Ars Poetica: "dulce et utile" — pleasing and useful.
• Longinus — On the Sublime: emotional elevation.
• Sir Philip Sidney — An Apology for Poetry (1595).
• John Dryden — Of Dramatic Poesy (1668).
• Alexander Pope — An Essay on Criticism (1711).
• Samuel Johnson — Preface to Shakespeare (1765); Lives of the Poets (1779–81).

Romantic criticism

• William Wordsworth — Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800/1802): poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings".
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Biographia Literaria (1817): primary/secondary imagination; willing suspension of disbelief.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley — A Defence of Poetry (1821, pub. 1840): "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".

Victorian and aestheticism

• Matthew Arnold — The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864); Culture and Anarchy (1869). Coined the "touchstone method" of comparative evaluation.
• Walter Pater — Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873): "to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame".
• Oscar Wilde — The Critic as Artist (1891).

Early 20th-century criticism

• T. S. Eliot — Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919); The Metaphysical Poets (1921); coined objective correlative in Hamlet and His Problems (1919).
• I. A. Richards — Practical Criticism (1929); Principles of Literary Criticism (1924); pioneer of close reading.
• William Empson — Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930).
• F. R. Leavis — The Great Tradition (1948); Scrutiny journal.

Russian Formalism (1915–1930s)

• Viktor Shklovsky — "Art as Technique" (1917); defamiliarisation (ostranenie).
• Roman Jakobson — six communication functions; metaphor/metonymy.
• Focus on literariness (the device, not the message).

New Criticism (1930s–1960s, USA)

• John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren.
• Treats the text as autonomous verbal artefact.
• Concepts: paradox, ambiguity, irony, tension, organic unity.
• Famous fallacies (Wimsatt & Beardsley): the intentional fallacy (author's intention) and the affective fallacy (reader's response).

Marxist criticism

• Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels — basis/superstructure model.
• Georg Lukács — The Theory of the Novel (1916); The Historical Novel (1937).
• Walter Benjamin — The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936).
• Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer — Frankfurt School.
• Raymond Williams — Culture and Society (1958); The Country and the City (1973); cultural materialism.
• Terry Eagleton — Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976); Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983).
• Fredric Jameson — The Political Unconscious (1981); Postmodernism (1991).

Psychoanalytic criticism

• Sigmund Freud — Oedipus complex; The Interpretation of Dreams (1900); The Uncanny (1919).
• Carl Jung — collective unconscious; archetypes.
• Jacques Lacan — return to Freud; "the unconscious is structured like a language"; mirror stage.

Structuralism

• Ferdinand de Saussure — Course in General Linguistics (1916): signifier/signified; langue/parole; arbitrariness of the sign.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss — structural anthropology; binary oppositions in myth.
• Roland Barthes — Mythologies (1957); S/Z (1970); "The Death of the Author" (1967).
• Northrop Frye — Anatomy of Criticism (1957) — archetypal/myth criticism.

Post-structuralism and deconstruction

• Jacques Derrida — Of Grammatology (1967); Writing and Difference (1967); différance; logocentrism; deconstruction.
• Michel Foucault — Discipline and Punish (1975); The History of Sexuality (1976–84); power/knowledge.
• Roland Barthes — late phase.
• Julia Kristeva — intertextuality.
• Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman — Yale School.

Reader-response criticism

• Wolfgang Iser — The Implied Reader (1972).
• Hans Robert Jauss — reception theory.
• Stanley Fish — "interpretive communities".
• Norman Holland, Louise Rosenblatt.

Feminist criticism

• Mary Wollstonecraft — A Vindication (1792).
• Virginia Woolf — A Room of One's Own (1929).
• Simone de Beauvoir — The Second Sex (1949).
• Kate Millett — Sexual Politics (1970).
• Elaine Showalter — A Literature of Their Own (1977); gynocriticism.
• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar — The Madwoman in the Attic (1979).
• Hélène Cixous — Écriture féminine; The Laugh of the Medusa (1975).
• Judith Butler — Gender Trouble (1990).

Postcolonial criticism

• Edward Said — Orientalism (1978); Culture and Imperialism (1993).
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988).
• Homi K. Bhabha — The Location of Culture (1994); hybridity, mimicry, third space.
• Frantz Fanon — Black Skin, White Masks (1952); The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
• Ngugi wa Thiong'o — Decolonising the Mind (1986).

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

• Stephen Greenblatt — Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980); coined "new historicism".
• Catherine Gallagher.
• Alan Sinfield, Jonathan Dollimore — British cultural materialism.

Ecocriticism

• Cheryll Glotfelty — The Ecocriticism Reader (1996).
• Lawrence Buell — The Environmental Imagination (1995).
• Timothy Morton — Ecology without Nature (2007).

Critical race and queer theory

• Henry Louis Gates Jr. — The Signifying Monkey (1988).
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick — Epistemology of the Closet (1990).
• Judith Butler — performativity.

Postmodernism

• Jean-François Lyotard — The Postmodern Condition (1979): incredulity towards metanarratives.
• Jean Baudrillard — Simulacra and Simulation (1981).
• Fredric Jameson — Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).
• Features: pastiche, parody, intertextuality, metafiction, fragmentation, blurred high/low culture.

Linda Hutcheon's "historiographic metafiction"

Names self-aware historical novels — Rushdie's Midnight's Children, García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman.