Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and methods of analyzing literature. It has roots in ancient Greece and Rome but modern literary theory emerged in the 1950s under the influence of structural linguistics. There are many schools of literary theory that take different approaches, including New Criticism, formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, and reader-response theory. The key differences between theories relate to their priorities, methods, and how they define a text. Literary theory remains an important part of literary scholarship today.

1. Literary theory
Discussion
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of
the methods for analyzing literature.[1] However, literary scholarship since the 19th
century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense
—considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and other
interdisciplinary themes.[2] In the humanities, the latter style of scholarship is often called
simply quot;theory.quot; As a consequence, the word quot;theoryquot; has become an umbrella term for a
variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts. Mos of these approaches are informed by
t
various strands of Continental philosophy.
Contents
[hide]
1 Literary theory and literature
2 History
3 Differences among schools
4 Schools of literary theory
5 See also
6 Notes
7 References
8 External links
9 References
10 Further reading
Literary theory and literature
One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is quot;What is literature?quot;, though many
contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that quot;literaturequot; cannot be
defined or that it can refer to any use of language. Specific theories are distinguished not
only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they define a quot;text.quot; For some
scholars of literature, quot;textsquot; comprises little more than quot;books belonging to the Western
literary canon.quot; But the principles and methods of literary theory have been applied to non-
fiction, popular fiction, film, historical documents, law, advertising, etc., in the related field
of cultural studies. In fact, some scholars within cultural studies treat cultural events, like
fashion or football riots, as quot;textsquot; to be interpreted. By this measure, literary theory can be

2. thought of as the general theory of interpretation.
Since theorists of literature often draw on a very heterogeneous tradition of Continental
philosophy and the philosophy of language, any classification of their approaches is only
an approximation. There are many quot;schoolsquot; or types of literary theory, which take
different approaches to understanding texts. Most theorists, even among those listed below,
combine methods from more than one of these approaches (for instance, the deconstructive
approach of Paul de Man drew on a long tradition of close reading pioneered by the New
Critics, and de Man was trained in the European hermeneutic tradition).
Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include the New Criticism,
formalism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism
and French feminism, Christian, post-colonialism, new historicism, deconstruction, reader-
response criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism.
[edit] History
The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical
roots that run as far back as ancient Greece (Aristotle's Poetics is an often cited early
example) and ancient Rome (Longinus' On the Sublime and Horace's Ars Poetica), and the
aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th and 19th
centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism of
literature are, of course, also closely tied to the history of literature.
The modern sense of quot;literary theory,quot; however, dates only to approximately the 195 0s,
when the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure began strongly to influence
English language literary criticism. The New Critics and various European-influenced
formalists (particularly the Russian Formalists) had described some of their more abstract
efforts as quot;theoreticalquot; as well. But it was not until the broad impact of structuralism began
to be felt in the English-speaking academic world that quot;literary theoryquot; was thought of as a
unified domain.
In the academic world of the United Kingdom and the United States, literary theory was at
its most popular from the late 1960s (when its influence was beginning to spread outward
from elite universities like Johns Hopkins and Yale) through the 1980s (by which time it
was taught nearly everywhere in some form). During this span of time, literary theory was
perceived as academically cutting-edge research, and most university literature departments
sought to teach and study theory and incorporate it into their curricula. Because of its
meteoric rise in popularity and the difficult language of its key texts, theory was also often
criticized as faddish or trendy obscurantism (and many academic satire novels of the
period, such as those by David Lodge, feature theory prominently). Some scholars, both
theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1970s and 1980s debates on the academic
merits of theory as quot;the theory wars.quot;
By the early 1990s, the popularity of quot;theoryquot; as a subject of interest by itself was declining
slightly (along with job openings for pure quot;theoristsquot;) even as the texts of literary theory
were incorporated into the study of almost all literature. As of 2004, the controversy over
the use of theory in literary studies has all but died out, and discussions on the topic within

3. literary and cultural studies tend now to be consi erably milder and less acrimonious
d
(though the appearance of volumes such as Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent,
edited by Daphne Patai with Will H. Corral, may signal a resurgence of the controversy).
Some scholars draw heavily on theory in their work, while others only mention it in
passing or not at all; but it is an acknowledged, important part ofthe study of literature.
[edit] Differences among schools
The intellectual traditions and priorities of the various kinds of literary theory are often
radically different. Even finding a set of common terms to compare them by can be
difficult.
For instance, the work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and
sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T. S. Eliot or Gerard
Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a
serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile a Marxist critic might find such
judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New
Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem's religious stance to be
able to understand it. Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by
understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the
poem's references to quot;Godquot; by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer
to.
Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically
different terms and goals (that is, the theories) ofthe critics. Their theories of reading
derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an
East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his
thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, and the post-structuralist's
work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language. To expect such
different approaches to have much in common would be naïve; so calling them all quot;theories
of literaturequot; without acknowledging their heterogeneity is itself a reduction of their
differences.
In the late 1950s, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach
for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early
reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out
in his Anatomy of Criticism, was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an
intertextual quot;order of wordsquot; and universality of certain structural types. His approach held
sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the
ascendence of post-structuralism.
For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction
between 'literary' and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools
(particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some
strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two
and have applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of 'texts', including film,
non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events.

4. Bakhtin argued that the quot;utter inadequacyquot; of literary theory is evident when it is forced to
deal with the novel; other genres are intact already stabilized while the novel is still young
and developing.[3]
Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is
intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own op inions about and
intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a
guiding factor and an important determiner of the 'correct' interpretation of texts. The New
Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts,
preferring to focus on quot;the text itselfquot; in a close reading. In fact, as much contention as
there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's
interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other.
[edit] Schools of literary theory
Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along
with their major authors. In many cases, such as those of the historian and philosopher
Michel Foucault and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the authors were not
primarily literary critics, but their work has been broadly influential in literary theory.
American pragmatism and other American approaches
Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty
Cultural studies - emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life
Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, and Stuart Hall (British Cultural Studies);
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; Michel de Certeau; also Paul
Gilroy, John Guillory
Comparative Literature - confronts literatures from different languages, nations,
cultures and disciplines to each other
Darwinian literary studies - situates literature in the context of evolution and natural
selection
Deconstruction - a strategy of close reading that elicits the ways that key terms and
concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning
undecidable
Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,
Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell
Gender (see feminist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of gender relations
Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Elaine Showalter
Formalism

5. German hermeneutics and philology
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Erich
Auerbach
Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of class conflict
Georg Lukács, Valentin Voloshinov, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton,
Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin,
New Criticism - which looked at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not
at the goals of the author or biographical issues
W.K. Wimsatt, F.R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert
Penn Warren
New historicism - which examines a text by also examining other texts of the time
period
Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, H. Aram Veeser
Postcolonialism - focuses on the influences of colonialism in literature, especially
regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed
countries and indigenous peoples by western nations
Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Declan Kiberd
Post-modernism - criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often
with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the Other
Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Maurice
Blanchot
Post-structuralism - a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as
deconstruction) that criticize or go beyond Structuralism's aspirations to create a
rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other
discursive and aesthetic formations
Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva
Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) - Explores the role of the
subconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the
text
Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Viktor Tausk
Queer theory - examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and
sexuality in literature
Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick, Michel Foucault

6. Reader Response - focuses upon the active response ofthe reader to a text
Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart
Hall
Russian Formalism
Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp
Structuralism and semiotics (see semiotic literary criticism) - examine the underlying
structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys
meaning through any structures
Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland
Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jurij Lotman, Antti Aarne, and morphology of
folklore
Eco-criticism - Explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural
world.
Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Northrop Frye,
Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Paul Bénichou, Barbara Johnson
See also
List of literary terms
List of literary movements
Notes
^ Culler 1997, p.1
^ Culler 1997, p.1
^ Bakhtin 1981, p.8
[edit] References
Culler, J. (1997) Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
university Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist.
Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Ho lquist. Austin and London: University of
Texas Press.

7. [edit] External links
Aristotle's Poetics (350 BCE)
Longinus' On the Sublime (1st century CE)
Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie (1595)
quot;A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philologyquot;, by José Ángel García
Landa
quot;Some Literary Criticism quotesquot;, by Tim Love
The Litcrit Toolkit
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: quot;Literary Theory,quot; by Vince Brewton
Annotated bibliography on literary theory
David Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners
References
Peter Barry. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.
ISBN 0-7190-6268-3.
Jonathan Culler. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. ISBN 0-19-285383-X.
Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction. ISBN 0-8166-1251-X.
Terry Eagleton. After Theory. ISBN 0-465-01773-8.
Jean-Michel Rabaté. The Future of Theory. ISBN 0-631-23013-0.
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. ISBN 0-8018-4560-2.
Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood. 2nd Ed.
ISBN 0-582-31287-6
Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. Ed. Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral.
ISBN 0-231-13417-7.
Further reading
Carroll, J. (2007). Evolutionary Approaches to Literature and Drama. In Robin

8. Dunbar and Louise Barrett, (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary
Psychology. Chapter 44. Full text
Castle, Gregory. Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2007.
Culler, Jonathan. The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
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