“Modernist” is a term most often used in literary studies to refer to an experimental, avant-garde style of writing prevalent between World War I and World War II, although it is sometimes applied more generally to the entire range of… Read More ›
Literary Theory
Stéphane Mallarmé and French Symbolism
It is no accident that references to the literary ideas and example of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) abound in contemporary literary criticism and theory. The great French poet’s notoriously refined aestheticism and fervent devotion to language led him to expound a… Read More ›
Symbolism
Symbolism, an aesthetic movement devoted primarily to discovering the true nature of poetry, originated in France in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, the central figures in the theory and practice of symbolism in… Read More ›
Victorian Literary Criticism
Victorian literary theory, sometimes dismissed as a hinterland, is a remarkably diverse and productive field. Of the four lines of theorizing identified by the philosopher of art Francis Sparshott in Theory of the Arts (1982)— the classical, expressive, oracular, and… Read More ›
Romantic Literary Criticism
In 1832, at the end of what is now called the Romantic age, Samuel Taylor Coleridge described “three silent revolutions in England: 1. When the Professions fell off from the Church; 2. When Literature fell off from the Professions; 3…. Read More ›
Late Eighteenth Century British Literary Criticism
In the second half of the eighteenth century, literary criticism turned away from the predominantly neoclassical thought of a previous generation, shifting from a vision of literature as a standard of civilized taste to one based on individual experience. Social… Read More ›
Early Eighteenth Century British Literary Criticism
Literary criticism developed in the early eighteenth century as part of a broader cultural discourse that included moral philosophy, politics, aesthetics, science, and economics. For critics otherwise as different as Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Joseph Addison (1672-1719), and Anthony Ashley Cooper,… Read More ›
Structuralist Marxism
Karl Marx’s mature writing from A Contribution to the Criticism of Political Economy (1859) through the first edition of Capital (1867) offers to analyze social and economic relations as systems and structures that follow scientific laws. In Marx’s vocabulary, a… Read More ›
Materialist Feminisms
Although feminists and socialists have engaged in continuous conversations since the nineteenth century, those crosscurrents within literary theory that might be designated “materialist feminisms” have their origins in the late 1960s with various attempts to synthesize feminist politics with Marxist… Read More ›
Poststructuralist Feminisms
“The question of gender is a question of language.” This statement is Barbara Johnson’s (World 37), and her succinct formulation of the relationship between gender and language does much to characterize the approach of a group of feminists who draw… Read More ›
Anglo-American Feminisms
Women’s experience as encountered in female fictional characters, the reactions of women readers, and the careers, techniques, and topics of women writers was the focus of the most accessible feminist criticism in the United States and Britain by the mid-1970s…. Read More ›
Literary Criticism of T. S. Eliot
Thomas Steams Eliot (1888-1965) has described his criticism as a “by-product” of his “private poetry-workshop” and as “a prolongation of the thinking that went into the formation of my own verse” (On Poetry 117). These devaluations minimize his status as… Read More ›
Discourse Theory
Discourse theorists take discourse, rather than language, as their domain in part because of difficulties with the latter term. The standard definition of “language” in linguistics (a set of units and the rules for combining them to make well-formed sentences)… Read More ›
Discourse Analysis
For many years, discourse analysis was less an explicit “theory” than a practical and empirical approach for supporting field work on relatively little-recorded languages and cultures (see, e.g., Grimes, Longacre, Malinowski, Pike). One domain of early work that attracted notice… Read More ›
Cultural Studies in the United States
Cultural studies emerged as a distinctive academic discipline in the English-speaking world between the 1960s and the 1990s as part of the broad shift in universities to new kinds of interdisciplinary analysis. Parallel to contemporaneous developments in ethnic studies and… Read More ›
Cultural Studies in the United Kingdom
While the field of literary studies from its inception took as its exclusive object of interest the literary canon, cultural studies has generally been concerned with what is left over, popular or mass culture—newspapers, magazines, radio, film, television, popular song,… Read More ›
Postcolonial (Cultural) Studies
Postcolonial (cultural) studies (PCS) constitutes a major intervention in the widespread revisionist project that has impacted academia since the 1960s—together with such other counterdiscourses that are gaining academic and disciplinary recognition as cultural studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies, African-American studies,… Read More ›
Indian Literary Theory and Criticism
The Western tradition of literary theory and criticism essentially derives from the Greeks, and there is a sense in which Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus mark out positions and debates that are still being played out today. At a moment when… Read More ›
Historical Criticism
Historical theory and criticism embraces not only the theory and practice of literary historiographical representation but also other types of criticism that, often without acknowledgment, presuppose a historical ground or adopt historical methods in an ad hoc fashion. Very frequently,… Read More ›
Drama Theory
Aristotle‘s Poetics, the first major text of Western drama theory, defined the terms of much subsequent discussion. Unlike such classical Eastern theoretical works on drama as the Sanskrit Natyasastra or Zeami Motokiyo’s writings on Noh, it makes only minor passing… Read More ›