In addition to their other works, the critic Wimsatt (1907–1975) and the philosopher Beardsley (1915–1985) produced two influential and controversial papers that propounded central positions of New Criticism, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) and The Affective Fallacy (1949). In the first of… Read More ›
Twentieth-century literary criticism and theory has comprised a broad range of tendencies and movements: a humanistic tradition, descended from nineteenth-century writers such as Matthew Arnold and continued into the twentieth century through figures such as Irving Babbitt and F. R…. Read More ›
TS Eliot‘s The Waste Land, which has come to be identified as the representative poem of the Modernist canon, indicates the pervasive sense of disillusionment about the current state of affairs in the modern society, especially post World War Europe,… Read More ›
IA Richards’ concept of four kinds of meaning has played a very significant role in New Criticism and modern tensional poetics. Pointing to the difficulty of all reading and of arriving at a universal meaning, Richards, in his Practical Criticism… Read More ›
New Critics attempted to systematize the study of literature, and develop an approach that was centred on the rigorous study of the text itself. Thus it was distinctively formalist in character, focusing on the textual aspects of the text such as rhythm, metre, imagery and metaphor, by the method of close reading, as against reading that on the basis of external evidences such as the history, author’s biography or the socio-political/cultural conditions of the text’s production. Although the New Critics were against Coleridge’s Impressionistic Criticism, they seem to have inherited his concept of the poem as a unified organic whole which reconciles its internal conflicts and achieves a fine balance.