The coining of this term has generally been credited to the American psychologist William James, older brother of novelist Henry James. It was originally used by psychologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to describe the personal awareness… Read More ›
Though the term metalanguage—a language that describes or analyzes another language— was in use well before the 1960s, it was around this time that theorists including Roman Jakobson (Linguistics and Poetics [1960]) and Roland Barthes (Mythologies [1957] and Elements of… Read More ›
Feminist literary criticism has its origins in the intellectual and political feminist movement. It advocates a critique of maledominated language and performs “resistant” readings of literary texts or histories. Based on the premise that social systems are patriarchal—organized to privilege… Read More ›
The struggle for women to gain the right to vote was fought not only in the political arena but in literature. Although the suffrage movement can be dated to the mid-19th century, its literature as a distinct category is generally… Read More ›
The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of authors in the later 1840s through the close of the 1890s who espoused a distinctive artistic philosophy. In form, Pre-Raphaelite short stories exhibit a highly finished style that refl ects and embodies the aesthetic… Read More ›
A term coined by British feminist Sarah Grand in an 1894 essay to describe an independent woman who seeks achievement and self-fulfilment beyond the realm of marriage and family. According to Grand, the New Woman “proclaimed for herself what was… Read More ›
Aestheticism was a 19th-century literary, artistic, and cultural movement influenced by the aesthetic philosophies of the German romantic school, by the art criticism of John Ruskin, and by French writers such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire. Aspects of aestheticism… Read More ›
Field poetics may be defined by a systematic integrity that overrides individual authorial intention. The system in play is usually a form of language, purely acoustic, or purely visual, often scored speech or another verbal matrix. Among the most uncompromising… Read More ›
The sublime is a central category of aesthetics in romanticism. It was a major topic of aesthetic theory in the 18th century, especially in England and Germany, but its inauguration as a topic was due to the translation by Nicolas… Read More ›
This is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for his most characteristic and idiosyncratic poetic mode. Hopkins seemed to define it as organizing lines around stressed syllables. In sprung rhythm, the poetic foot always starts on a stressed syllable and may be… Read More ›
Nineteen Eighty-Four is Orwell’s final and most famous full-length work of fiction, published in 1949. In Animal Farm, Orwell had realized his goal of making political writing an art. (Although later generations would judge that he had already achieved that… Read More ›
Desmond MacCarthy’s claim that there “is little in common between the work of Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, David Garnett, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster” (Memories 172) is a useful starting… Read More ›
Russian Formalism, a movement of literary criticism and interpretation, emerged in Russia during the second decade of the twentieth century and remained active until about 1930. Members of what can be loosely referred to as the Formalist school emphasized first… Read More ›
Reception theory, the approach to literature that concerns itself first and foremost with one or more readers’ actualization of the text, is based on a collective enterprise that has had far-reaching institutional consequences. Hans Robert Jauss, with his University of… Read More ›
Reader-response criticism can be traced as far back as Aristotle and Plato, both of whom based their critical arguments at least partly on literature’s effect on the reader. It has more immediate sources in the writings of the French structuralists… Read More ›
Twentieth-century semiotics and structuralism emerged simultaneously from the same source: the postpositivistic paradigm initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure and Russian formalism. The first systematic formulation of semiotic structuralism came from scholars of the Prague Linguistic Circle (PLC), who are now… Read More ›
A cognitive theory of pragmatics originally developed in the 1980s by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance theory offers a new approach to the study of human communication which is firmly grounded in a general view of human cognitive design…. Read More ›
Speech act theory accounts for an act that a speaker performs when pronouncing an utterance, which thus serves a function in communication. Since speech acts are the tools that allow us to interact in real-life situations, uttering a speech act… Read More ›
Referring to two aspects of language examined by Ferdinand de Saussure at the beginning of the twentieth century, langue denotes a system of internalized, shared rules governing a national language’s vocabulary, grammar, and sound system; parole designates actual oral and… Read More ›
Accentual meter: A base meter in which the occurrence of a syllable marked by a stress determines the basic unit, regardless of the number of unstressed syllables. It is one of four base meters used in English (accentual, accentual-syllabic, syllabic,… Read More ›
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