Descriptive Criticism

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.