This sectionneeds expansion. You can help byadding to it.(January 2024)
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'sPoetics is an often cited early example), ancient India (Bharata Muni'sNatya Shastra), and ancient Rome (Longinus'sOn the Sublime). In medieval times, scholars in the Middle East (Al-Jahiz'sal-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin andal-Hayawan, andibn al-Mu'tazz'sKitab al-Badi)[3] and Europe[4] built rules for poetry and rhetoric. Theaesthetic theories ofphilosophers fromancient philosophy through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory andcriticism of literature are tied to thehistory of literature.
Some scholars refer to the 1980s-90s debates on the academic merits of theory as "thetheory wars".[5] A driving question of the theory wars was whether literary theory departments were primarily meant to train students in close reading and appreciation, or to interrogate culture and ideology throughMarxism,feminism,deconstruction, and beyond.[6]
Theory begins when a culture asks what art is for.[7] One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "What isliterature?" and "How should or do we read?". Some contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use oflanguage. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they create meaning in a "text". However, some theorists acknowledge that these texts do not have a singular, fixed meaning which is deemed "correct".[8]
The different interpretive and epistemological perspectives of different schools of theory often arise from, and so give support to, different moral and political commitments. For instance, the work of theNew Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem byT. S. Eliot orGerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile, aMarxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough. Or apost-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 "God" 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) of the 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, the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language.
In the late 1950s, the Canadian literary criticNorthrop 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 hisAnatomy of Criticism, was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the ascendance 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.
Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it is forced to deal with thenovel; while other genres are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing.[9]
Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions 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 "the text itself" in aclose 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.
Artificial intelligence writing has created new opportunities for examining literature, asN. Katherine Hayles' work,Bacteria to AI points out.[10] Hayles calls for using "literary-critical techniques" to analyze meanings from AI-derived texts, such asChatGPT.[11] Ethical literary criticism also employs scientific methods to study how literature is created and to examine ethical implications of AI creating literature.[12]
Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors:
Aestheticism – associated withRomanticism, a philosophy defining aesthetic value as the primary goal in understanding literature. This includes both literary critics who have tried to understand and/or identify aesthetic values and those like Oscar Wilde who have stressedart for art's sake.
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
Post-structuralism – a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such asdeconstruction) that criticize or go beyondStructuralism's aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formations
Psychoanalysis (seepsychoanalytic literary criticism) – explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text
Structuralism andsemiotics (seesemiotic literary criticism) – examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any structures
^van Gelder, G. J. H. (1982),Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem,Brill Publishers, pp. 1–2,ISBN90-04-06854-6
^Johnson, Eleanor (2013).Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve. University of Chicago Press. pp. 1–15.ISBN978-0-226-01598-9.
^Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, Sara Rushing, "Introduction", in: Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, Sara Rushing (eds.),Histories of Postmodernism, Routledge, 2020.
^Eagleton, Terry.Literary Theory: An Introduction.
^Sullivan, Patrick (2002-01-01). ""Reception Moments," Modern Literary Theory, and the Teaching of Literature".Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.45 (7):568–577.JSTOR40012241.
^Hayles, Nancy Katherine (2025).Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts (1st ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 156.ISBN978-0-226-83747-5.
![[icon]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=https%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aWiki_letter_w_cropped.svg)
