A genre ofarts criticism,literary criticism orliterary studies is the study,evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced byliterary theory, which is thephilosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although 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 fromliterary theory 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.[2]
Literary criticism is thought to have existed as far back as the classical period.[3] In the 4th century BCAristotle wrote thePoetics, a typology and explanation along with understanding of literary forms with many specific criticisms of contemporary works of art.Poetics developed for the first time the concepts ofmimesis andcatharsis, which are still crucial in literary studies.[4]
The literary criticism of theRenaissance developed classical ideas of unity of form and content into literaryneoclassicism, 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'sLatin translation ofAristotle'sPoetics. The work of Aristotle, especiallyPoetics, 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'sPoetics in 1570.
The seventeenth-century witnessed the first full-fledged crisis in modernity of the core critical-aesthetic principles inherited fromclassical antiquity, such as proportion, harmony, unity,decorum, that had long governed, guaranteed, and stabilized Western thinking about artworks.[7] AlthoughClassicism was very far from spent as a cultural force, it was to be gradually challenged by a rival movement, namely Baroque, that favoured the transgressive and the extreme, without laying claim to the unity, harmony, or decorum that supposedly distinguished both nature and its greatest imitator, namely ancient art.
The key concepts of theBaroque aesthetic, such as "conceit' (concetto), "wit" (acutezza,ingegno), and "wonder" (meraviglia), were not fully developed in literary theory until the publication ofEmanuele Tesauro'sIl Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope) in 1654. This seminal treatise – inspired byGiambattista Marino's epicAdone and the work of the Spanish Jesuit philosopherBaltasar Gracián – developed a theory ofmetaphor as a universal language of images and as a supreme intellectual act, at once an artifice and an epistemologically privileged mode of access to truth.
In theEnlightenment period (1700s–1800s), literary criticism became more popular. During this timeliteracy rates started to rise in the public;[8] no longer was reading exclusive for the wealthy or scholarly. With the rise of the literate public, the swiftness of printing and commercialization of literature, criticism arose too.[9] Reading was no longer viewed solely as educational or as a sacred source of religion; it was a form of entertainment.[10] 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.[11]
These critical reviews were published in many magazines, newspapers, and journals. The commercialization of literature and its mass production had its downside. The emergent literary market, which was expected to educate the public and keep them away fromsuperstition and prejudice, increasingly diverged from the idealistic control of the Enlightenment theoreticians so that the business of Enlightenment became a business with the Enlightenment.[12] This development – particularly of emergence of entertainment literature – was addressed through an intensification of criticism.[12] Many works ofJonathan Swift, for instance, were criticized including his bookGulliver's Travels, which one critic described as "the detestable story of the Yahoos".[11]
The BritishRomantic movement of the early nineteenth century introduced newaesthetic 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 enlighten and add to the knowledge of a common subject to the level of thesublime.German Romanticism, which followed closely after the late development of Germanclassicism, emphasized an understanding and beauty of fragmentation that can appear startlingly modern to the reader of English literature, and valuedWitz – 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 asMatthew Arnold.
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 asRussian Formalism, and slightly later theNew 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 theclose reading of texts, elevating it far above generalizing discussion and speculation about eitherauthorial intention[13] (to say nothing of the author's psychology or biography, which became almost taboo subjects) orreader response:[14] together known asWimsatt andBeardsley's intentional fallacy andaffective fallacy.[15][16] This emphasis on form and precise attention to "the words themselves" has persisted, after the decline of these critical doctrines themselves.[17]
In 1957Northrop Frye published the influentialAnatomy 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 hisDegenerate Moderns thatStanley Fish was influenced by his own adulterous affairs to reject classic literature that condemned adultery.[18]Jürgen Habermas, inErkenntnis und Interesse [1968] (Knowledge and Human Interests), described literary critical theory in literary studies as a form ofhermeneutics: 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, theNew 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 philosophicalliterary theory, influenced bystructuralism, thenpost-structuralism, and other kinds ofContinental philosophy. It continued until the 1990s when interest in "concept" 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.
Today, approaches based inliterary theory andcontinental philosophy largely coexist in university literature departments, while conventional methods, some informed by theNew 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.
Some critics work largely with theoretical texts, while others read traditional literature; interest in the literarycanon is still great, but many critics are also interested in nontraditional texts andwomen's literature, as elaborated on by certain academic journals such asContemporary Women's Writing,[19] while some critics influenced bycultural studies read popular texts like comic books orpulp/genre fiction.Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and the natural sciences.Darwinian literary studies studies literature in the context ofevolutionary influences on human nature. Andpostcritique has sought to develop new ways of reading and responding to literary texts that go beyond the interpretive methods ofcritique. Many literary critics also work infilm criticism ormedia studies.
Related to other forms of literary criticism, thehistory of the book is a field of an inter-disciplinary inquiry drawing on the methods ofbibliography,cultural history,history of literature, andmedia 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.
Major twentieth-century schools of critical analysis
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
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
György Lukács:The Ideal of the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois Aesthetics;Art and Objective Truth
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
^Baxter, John (1997).Aristotle's Poetics: Translated and with a Commentary by George Whalley. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. pp. xxii–xxxiii.
^Gadamer, Hans-Georg; Gadamer, Hans-Georg (2003).Truth and Method (2 ed.). New York: Continuum. p. 292.ISBN978-0-8264-0585-2.
^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.ISBN978-90-04-06854-4.OCLC10350183.
^Jon R. Snyder,L’estetica del Barocco (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), 21–22.
^Van Horn Melton, James (2001).The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 82.ISBN978-0-521-46573-1.
^Voskuhl, Adelheid (2013).Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 71–72.ISBN978-0-226-03402-7.
^abRegan, Shaun; Dawson, Books (2013).Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Lewisburg [Pa.]: Bucknell University Press. pp. 125–130.ISBN978-1-61148-478-6.
^Davis, Theo (2007).Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century. New York, New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 69.ISBN9781139466561.
