Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

 and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes which are of relevance to the way humans interpret meaning. In humanities

Humanities

The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....

 in modern academia, the latter style of scholarship is an outgrowth of critical theory

Critical theory

Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...

 and is often called simply "theory." As a consequence, the word "theory" has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts. Many of these approaches are informed by various strands of Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...

 and sociology

Sociology

Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

.

Literary theory and literature

One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "what is literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

?" – although many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they define a "text

Text (literary theory)

A text, within literary theory, is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. This set of symbols is considered in terms of the informative message's content, rather than in terms of its physical form or the medium in which it is represented...

". For some scholars of literature, "texts" comprises little more than "books belonging to the Western literary canon

Western canon

The term Western canon denotes a canon of books and, more broadly, music and art that have been the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. As such, it includes the "greatest works of artistic merit." Such a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism and the...

." But the principles and methods of literary theory have been applied to non-fiction, popular fiction, film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

, historical documents, law, advertising, etc., in the related field of cultural studies

Cultural studies

Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...

. In fact, some scholars within cultural studies treat cultural events, like fashion

Fashion

Fashion, a general term for a currently popular style or practice, especially in clothing, foot wear, or accessories. Fashion references to anything that is the current trend in look and dress up of a person...

 or football riots

Football hooliganism

Football hooliganism, sometimes referred to by the British media as the English Disease, is unruly and destructive behaviour—such as brawls, vandalism and intimidation—by association football club fans...

, as "texts" to be interpreted. By this measure, literary theory can be thought of as the general theory of interpretation.

Since theorists of literature often draw on a very heterogeneous tradition of Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...

 and the philosophy of language

Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...

, any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many "schools" or types of literary theory, which take different approaches to understanding texts. Most theorists, even among those listed below, combine methods from more than one of these approaches (for instance, the deconstructive

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...

 approach of Paul de Man

Paul de Man

Paul de Man was a Belgian-born deconstructionist literary critic and theorist.He began teaching at Bard College. Later, he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the late 1950s...

 drew on a long tradition of close reading

Close reading

Close reading describes, in literary criticism, the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they...

 pioneered by the New Critics, and de Man was trained in the European hermeneutic tradition).

Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include historical and biographical criticism

Biographical criticism

Biographical criticism is a form of Literary criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the relationship between the author's life and their works of literature...

, New Criticism

New Criticism

New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...

, formalism

Formalism (literature)

Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar...

, Russian formalism

Russian formalism

Russian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur who...

, and structuralism

Structuralism

Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...

, post-structuralism

Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...

, Marxism

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

, feminism

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

 and French feminism, post-colonialism, new historicism

New Historicism

New Historicism is a school of literary theory, grounded in critical theory, that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s....

, deconstruction

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...

, reader-response criticism

Reader-response criticism

Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader and his or her experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.Although literary theory has long paid some...

, and psychoanalytic

Psychoanalytic literary criticism

Psychoanalytic literary criticism refers to literary criticism or literary theory which, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud....

 criticism.

History

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

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

's Poetics is an often cited early example), ancient India (Bharata Muni

Bharata Muni

Bharata was an ancient Indian musicologist who authored the Natya Shastra, a theoretical treatise on ancient Indian dramaturgy and histrionics, dated to between roughly 400 BC and 200 BC. Indian dance and music find their root in the Natyashastra...

's Natya Shastra

Natya Shastra

The Natya Shastra is an ancient Indian treatise on the performing arts, encompassing theatre, dance and music. It was written during the period between 200 BC and 200 AD in classical India and is traditionally attributed to the Sage Bharata.The Natya Shastra is incredibly wide in its scope...

), ancient Rome (Longinus

Longinus (literature)

Longinus is the conventional name of the author of the treatise, On the Sublime , a work which focuses on the effect of good writing. Longinus, sometimes referred to as Pseudo-Longinus because his real name is unknown, was a Greek teacher of rhetoric or a literary critic who may have lived in the...

's On the Su]) and medieval Iraq (Al-Jahiz

Al-Jahiz

Al-Jāḥiẓ was an Arabic prose writer and author of works of literature, Mu'tazili theology, and politico-religious polemics.In biology, Al-Jahiz introduced the concept of food chains and also proposed a scheme of animal evolution that entailed...

's al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan, and ibn al-Mu'tazz

Abdullah ibn al-Mu'tazz

Abdullah ibn al-Mu'tazz was persuaded to assume the role of caliph of the Abbasid dynasty following the premature death of al-Muktafi. He succeeded in ruling for a single day and a single night, before he was forced into hiding, found, and then strangled in a palace intrigue that brought...

's Kitab al-Badi), and the aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy

Ancient philosophy

This page lists some links to ancient philosophy. In Western philosophy, the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire marked the ending of Hellenistic philosophy and ushered in the beginnings of Medieval philosophy, whereas in Eastern philosophy, the spread of Islam through the Arab Empire...

 through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism

Literary criticism

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...

 of literature are, of course, also closely tied to the history of literature

History of literature

The history of literature is the historical development of writings in prose or poetry which attempts to provide entertainment, enlightenment, or instruction to the reader/hearer/observer, as well as the development of the literary techniques used in the communication of these pieces. Not all...

.

The modern sense of "literary theory," however, dates only to approximately the 1950s, when the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...

 began strongly to influence English language

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 literary criticism. The New Critics and various European-influenced formalist

Formalism (literature)

Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar...

s (particularly the Russian Formalists) had described some of their more abstract efforts as "theoretical" as well. But it was not until the broad impact of structuralism began to be felt in the English-speaking academic world that "literary theory" was thought of as a unified domain.

In the academic world of the United Kingdom and the United States, literary theory was at its most popular from the late 1960s (when its influence was beginning to spread outward from elite universities like Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

, Yale

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

, and Cornell

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

) through the 1980s (by which time it was taught nearly everywhere in some form). During this span of time, literary theory was perceived as academically cutting-edge, and most university literature departments sought to teach and study theory and incorporate it into their curricula. Because of its meteoric rise in popularity and the difficult language of its key texts, theory was also often criticized as fad

FAD

In biochemistry, flavin adenine dinucleotide is a redox cofactor involved in several important reactions in metabolism. FAD can exist in two different redox states, which it converts between by accepting or donating electrons. The molecule consists of a riboflavin moiety bound to the phosphate...

dish or trendy obscurantism

Obscurantism

Obscurantism is the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known. There are two, common, historical and intellectual, denotations: 1) restricting knowledge—opposition to the spread of knowledge, a policy of withholding knowledge from the...

 (and many academic satire novels of the period, such as those by David Lodge

David Lodge (author)

David John Lodge CBE, is an English author.In his novels, Lodge often satirises academia in general and the humanities in particular. He was brought up Catholic and has described himself as an "agnostic Catholic". Many of his characters are Catholic and their Catholicism is a major theme...

, feature theory prominently). Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1970s and 1980s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars."

By the early 1990s, the popularity of "theory" as a subject of interest by itself was declining slightly (along with job openings for pure "theorists") even as the texts of literary theory were incorporated into the study of almost all literature. , the controversy over the use of theory in literary studies has all but died out, and discussions on the topic within literary and cultural studies tend now to be considerably milder and less acrimonious (though the appearance of volumes such as Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Nathan Parker with Andrew Costigan, sought a resurgence of the controversy). Some scholars draw heavily on theory in their work, while others only mention it in passing or not at all; but it is an acknowledged, important part of the study of literature.

Differences among schools

For instance, the work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

 or Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous 20th-century fame established him among the leading Victorian poets...

 for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem's religious stance to be able to understand it. Or a post-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. A critic using Darwinian literary studies

Darwinian literary studies

Darwinian Literary Studies is a branch of literary criticism that studies literature in the context of evolution by means of natural selection, including gene-culture coevolution...

 might use arguments from the evolutionary psychology of religion

Evolutionary psychology of religion

The evolutionary psychology of religion is the study of religious belief using evolutionary psychology principles. It is one approach to the psychology of religion. As with all other organs and organ functions, the brain and cognition's functional structure have been argued to have a genetic basis,...

.

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, and the Darwinian from the modern evolutionary synthesis

Modern evolutionary synthesis

The modern evolutionary synthesis is a union of ideas from several biological specialties which provides a widely accepted account of evolution...

. To expect such different approaches to have much in common would be naïve; so calling them all "theories of literature" without acknowledging their heterogeneity is itself a reduction of their differences.

In the late 1950s, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye

Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....

 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 his Anatomy of Criticism

Anatomy of Criticism

Herman Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays attempts to formulate an overall view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism derived exclusively from literature...

, 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.

Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it is forced to deal with the novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

; while other genres are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing.

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 a close reading

Close reading

Close reading describes, in literary criticism, the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they...

. 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.

Schools of literary theory

Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors. In many cases, such as those of the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...

 and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....

, the authors were not primarily literary critics, but their work has been broadly influential in literary theory.

• Aestheticism
  Aestheticism
  Aestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...
  
   – often associated with Romanticism
  Romanticism
  Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
  
  , 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 stressed art for art's sake
  Art for art's sake
  "Art for art's sake" is the usual English rendering of a French slogan, from the early 19th century, l'art pour l'art, and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function...
  
  .
  • Oscar Wilde
    Oscar Wilde
    Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
    
    , Walter Pater
    Walter Pater
    Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, critic of art and literature, and writer of fiction.-Early life:...
    
    , Harold Bloom
    Harold Bloom
    Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
    
    
• American pragmatism
  Pragmatism
  Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...
  
   and other American approaches
  • Harold Bloom
    Harold Bloom
    Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
    
    , Stanley Fish
    Stanley Fish
    Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island...
    
    , Richard Rorty
    Richard Rorty
    Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University...
    
    
• Cognitive Cultural Studies – applies research in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive evolutionary psychology and anthropology, and philosophy of mind to the study of literature and culture
  • Frederick Luis Aldama
    Frederick Luis Aldama
    Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at The Ohio State University, United States, where he teaches Latino/a and Latin American post-colonial literature, film, and comics, as well as narrative theory and cognitive science.Aldama obtained his Ph.D. from...
    
    , Mary Thomas Crane, Nancy Easterlin, David Herman, Suzanne Keen, Patrick Colm Hogan, Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, Blakey Vermeule
    Blakey Vermeule
    Emily Dickinson Blake Vermeule , commonly known as Blakey Vermeule is an American scholar of eighteenth-century British literature and theory of mind. She is a Professor of English at Stanford University.-Biography:...
    
    , Lisa Zunshine
    Lisa Zunshine
    ]Lisa Zunshine is a scholar of 18th-century British literature, whose interests include cultural historicism, narrative theory, and cognitive approaches to literary and cultural studies . She is a Bush-Holbrook professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington...
    
    
• Cultural studies
  Cultural studies
  Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...
  
   – emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life
  • Raymond Williams
    Raymond Williams
    Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
    
    , Dick Hebdige
    Dick Hebdige
    Richard "Dick" Hebdige is an expatriate British media theorist and sociologist most commonly associated with the study of subcultures, and its resistance against the mainstream of society.-Life and career:...
    
    , and Stuart Hall
    Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)
    Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of...
    
     (British Cultural Studies); Max Horkheimer
    Max Horkheimer
    Max Horkheimer was a German-Jewish philosopher-sociologist, famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the 'Frankfurt School' of social research. His most important works include The Eclipse of Reason and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment...
    
     and Theodor Adorno; Michel de Certeau
    Michel de Certeau
    Michel de Certeau was a French Jesuit and scholar whose work combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences.-Education:...
    
    ; also Paul Gilroy
    Paul Gilroy
    -Biography:Born in the East End of London to Guyanese and English parents , he was educated at University College School and obtained his bachelor's degree at Sussex University in 1978. He moved from there to Birmingham University where he completed his Ph.D...
    
    , John Guillory
• Comparative literature
  Comparative literature
  Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...
  
   – compares literatures from different languages, nations, cultures and disciplines to each other
• Darwinian literary studies
  Darwinian literary studies
  Darwinian Literary Studies is a branch of literary criticism that studies literature in the context of evolution by means of natural selection, including gene-culture coevolution...
  
   – situates literature in the context of evolution and natural selection
• Deconstruction
  Deconstruction
  Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
  
   – a strategy of close reading that elicits the ways that key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable
  • Jacques Derrida
    Jacques Derrida
    Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
    
    , Paul de Man
    Paul de Man
    Paul de Man was a Belgian-born deconstructionist literary critic and theorist.He began teaching at Bard College. Later, he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the late 1950s...
    
    , J. Hillis Miller
    J. Hillis Miller
    Joseph Hillis Miller, Jr. is an American literary critic who has been heavily influenced by—and who has heavily influenced—deconstruction.- Early life and education :...
    
    , Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
    Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
    Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a French philosopher. He was also a literary critic and translator....
    
    , Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell
    Avital Ronell
    Avital Ronell is a Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and a Professor of German, comparative literature, and English at New York University, where she co-directs the Research in Trauma and Violence project...
    
    
• Gender
  Gender
  Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
  
   (see feminist literary criticism
  Feminist literary criticism
  Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism more broadly. Its history has been broad and varied, from classic works of nineteenth-century women authors such as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cutting-edge theoretical work in...
  
  ) – which emphasizes themes of gender relations
  • Luce Irigaray
    Luce Irigaray
    Luce Irigaray is a Belgian feminist, philosopher, linguist, psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. She is best known for her works Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One .-Biography:...
    
    , Judith Butler
    Judith Butler
    Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...
    
    , Hélène Cixous
    Hélène Cixous
    Hélène Cixous is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician. She holds honorary degrees from Queen's University and the University of Alberta in Canada; University College Dublin in Ireland; the University of York and University College...
    
    , Elaine Showalter
    Elaine Showalter
    Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics.She is well known and respected in both academic and popular...
    
    
• Formalism
  Formalism (literature)
  Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar...
  
  
• German hermeneutics and philology
  Philology
  Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
  
  
  • Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey
    Wilhelm Dilthey
    Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist and hermeneutic philosopher, who held Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of...
    
    , Hans-Georg Gadamer
    Hans-Georg Gadamer
    Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method .-Life:...
    
    , Erich Auerbach
    Erich Auerbach
    Erich Auerbach was a philologist and comparative scholar and critic of literature. His best-known work is Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a history of representation in Western literature from ancient to modern times.-Biography:Auerbach, who was Jewish, was born in...
    
    
• Marxism
  Marxism
  Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
  
   (see Marxist literary criticism
  Marxist literary criticism
  Marxist literary criticism is a loose term describing literary criticism based on socialist and dialectic theories. Marxist criticism views literary works as reflections of the social institutions from which they originate...
  
  ) – which emphasizes themes of class conflict
  • Georg Lukács
    Georg Lukács
    György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the concept of reification to Marxist philosophy and theory and expanded Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. Lukács' was also an influential literary...
    
    , Valentin Voloshinov
    Valentin Voloshinov
    Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov was a Soviet/Russian linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of literary theory and Marxist theory of ideology....
    
    , Raymond Williams
    Raymond Williams
    Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
    
    , Terry Eagleton
    Terry Eagleton
    Terence Francis Eagleton FBA is a British literary theorist and critic, who is regarded as one of Britain's most influential living literary critics...
    
    , Fredric Jameson
    Fredric Jameson
    Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...
    
    , Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin
    Walter Benjamin
    Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...
    
    ,
• Modernism
  Modernism
  Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
  
  
• New Criticism
  New Criticism
  New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...
  
   – looks at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issues
  • W.K. Wimsatt, F.R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom
    John Crowe Ransom
    John Crowe Ransom was an American poet, essayist, magazine editor, and professor.-Life:...
    
    , Cleanth Brooks
    Cleanth Brooks
    Cleanth Brooks was an influential American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education...
    
    , Robert Penn Warren
    Robert Penn Warren
    Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
    
    
• New Historicism
  New Historicism
  New Historicism is a school of literary theory, grounded in critical theory, that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s....
  
   – which examines the work through its historical context and seeks to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature
  • Stephen Greenblatt
    Stephen Greenblatt
    Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a literary critic, theorist and scholar.Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term...
    
    , Louis Montrose
    Louis Montrose
    Louis Adrian Montrose is an American literary theorist and academic scholar. His scholarship has addressed a wide variety of literary, historical, and theoretical topics and issues, and has significantly shaped contemporary studies of Renaissance poetics, English Renaissance theatre, and Elizabeth I...
    
    , Jonathan Goldberg
    Jonathan Goldberg
    Jonathan Goldberg is a literary theorist; formerly the Sir William Osler Professor of English Literature at Johns Hopkins University, he is currently Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English at Emory University where he directs Studies in Sexualities...
    
    , H. Aram Veeser
• Postcolonialism
  Postcolonialism
  Post-colonialism is a specifically post-modern intellectual discourse that consists of reactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy of colonialism...
  
   – focuses on the influences of colonialism
  Colonialism
  Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
  
   in literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous peoples
  Indigenous peoples
  Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as indigenous according to one of the various definitions of the term, there is no universally accepted definition but most of which carry connotations of being the "original inhabitants" of a territory....
  
   by Western nations
  • Edward Said
    Edward Said
    Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...
    
    , Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian literary critic, theorist and a University Professor at Columbia University. She is best known for the essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. She...
    
    , Homi Bhabha
    Homi K. Bhabha
    Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies, and has coined a number of the field's neologisms and...
    
     and Declan Kiberd
    Declan Kiberd
    Declan Kiberd is an Irish writer and scholar. He is known for his literary criticism of Irish literature in Irish and English, and his contributions to public cultural life....
    
    
• Postmodernism
  Postmodernism
  Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
  
   – criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the Other
  Other
  The Other or Constitutive Other is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is Other than the initial concept being considered...
  
  
  • Michel Foucault
    Michel Foucault
    Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
    
    , Roland Barthes
    Roland Barthes
    Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
    
    , Gilles Deleuze
    Gilles Deleuze
    Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
    
    , Félix Guattari
    Félix Guattari
    Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
    
     and Maurice Blanchot
    Maurice Blanchot
    Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida.-Works:...
    
    
• Post-structuralism
  Post-structuralism
  Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...
  
   – a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as deconstruction
  Deconstruction
  Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
  
  ) that criticize or go beyond Structuralism
  Structuralism
  Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
  
  's aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formations
  • Roland Barthes
    Roland Barthes
    Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
    
    , Michel Foucault
    Michel Foucault
    Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
    
    , Julia Kristeva
    Julia Kristeva
    Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot...
    
    
• Psychoanalysis
  Psychoanalysis
  Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
  
   (see psychoanalytic literary criticism
  Psychoanalytic literary criticism
  Psychoanalytic literary criticism refers to literary criticism or literary theory which, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud....
  
  ) – explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text
  • Sigmund Freud
    Sigmund Freud
    Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
    
    , Jacques Lacan
    Jacques Lacan
    Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
    
    , Harold Bloom
    Harold Bloom
    Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
    
    , Slavoj Žižek
    Slavoj Žižek
    Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis....
    
    , Viktor Tausk
    Viktor Tausk
    Viktor Tausk was a pioneer psychoanalyst and neurologist. A student and a colleague of Sigmund Freud, he was the earliest exponent of psychoanalytical concepts with regard to clinical psychosis and the personality of the artist.-Career:Tausk had been a lawyer and writer when he began to study...
    
    
• Queer theory
  Queer theory
  Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself...
  
   – examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and sexuality in literature
  • Judith Butler
    Judith Butler
    Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...
    
    , Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
    Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
    Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an American academic scholar in the fields of gender studies, queer theory , and critical theory. Her critical writings helped create the field of queer studies...
    
    , Michel Foucault
    Michel Foucault
    Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
    
    
• Reader-response criticism
  Reader-response criticism
  Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader and his or her experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.Although literary theory has long paid some...
  
   – focuses upon the active response of the reader to a text
  • Louise Rosenblatt
    Louise Rosenblatt
    Louise Michelle Rosenblatt was an American university professor. She is best-known as a researcher into the teaching of literature.-Biography:...
    
    , Wolfgang Iser
    Wolfgang Iser
    -Biography:He was born in Marienberg, Germany. His parents were Paul and Else Iser. He studied literature in the universities of Leipzig and Tübingen before receiving his PhD in English at Heidelberg with a dissertation on the world view of Henry Fielding...
    
    , Norman Holland, Hans-Robert Jauss
    Hans-Robert Jauss
    Hans Robert Jauss was a German academic, notable for his work in reception theory and medieval and modern French literature.-Early years and education:...
    
    , Stuart Hall
    Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)
    Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of...
    
    
• Russian formalism
  Russian formalism
  Russian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur who...
  
  
  • Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp
    Vladimir Propp
    Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was a Russian and Soviet formalist scholar who analyzed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements.- Biography :...
    
    
• Structuralism
  Structuralism
  Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
  
   and semiotics
  Semiotics
  Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
  
   (see semiotic literary criticism
  Semiotic literary criticism
  Semiotic literary criticism, also called literary semiotics, is the approach to literary criticism informed by the theory of signs or semiotics...
  
  ) – examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any structures
  • Ferdinand de Saussure
    Ferdinand de Saussure
    Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
    
    , Roman Jakobson
    Roman Jakobson
    Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
    
    , Claude Lévi-Strauss
    Claude Lévi-Strauss
    Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
    
    , Roland Barthes
    Roland Barthes
    Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
    
    , Mikhail Bakhtin
    Mikhail Bakhtin
    Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...
    
    , Jurij Lotman, Antti Aarne
    Antti Aarne
    Antti Amatus Aarne was a Finnish folklorist.-Background:Aarne was the student of Julius Krohn and his son Kaarle Krohn...
    
    , Jacques Ehrmann
    Jacques Ehrmann
    Jacques Ehrmann was a French literary theorist and a faculty member of the Yale University French Department from 1961 until his death in 1972.-Biography:...
    
    , Northrop Frye
    Northrop Frye
    Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....
    
     and morphology of folklore
    Morphology (folkloristics)
    Morphology, broadly, is the study of form or structure. Folkloristic morphology, then, is the study of the structure of folklore and fairy tales....
    
    
• Eco-criticism – explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world
• Other theorists: Robert Graves
  Robert Graves
  Robert von Ranke Graves 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, translator and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works...
  
  , Alamgir Hashmi
  Alamgir Hashmi
  Alamgir Hashmi is a major English poet of Pakistani origin in the latter half of the 20th century. Considered avant-garde, both his early and later works were published to universal critical acclaim and widespread influence...
  
  , John Sutherland
  John Sutherland
  John Andrew Sutherland is an English academic, emeritus professor, newspaper columnist and author.John Sutherland is now Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. After graduating from the University of Leicester in 1964, he began his academic...
  
  , Leslie Fiedler
  Leslie Fiedler
  Leslie Aaron Fiedler was a Jewish-American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work also involves application of psychological theories to American literature. He was in practical terms one of the early postmodernist critics working...
  
  , Kenneth Burke
  Kenneth Burke
  Kenneth Duva Burke was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.-Personal history:...
  
  , Paul Bénichou
  Paul Bénichou
  Paul Bénichou, was a French writer, intellectual, critic, and literary historian.Bénichou first achieved prominence in 1948 with Morales du grand siècle, his work on the social context of the French seventeenth-century classics...
  
  , Barbara Johnson
  Barbara Johnson
  Barbara Johnson was an American literary critic and translator. She was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University...
  
  

The concept of emergence

Emergence

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems....

 has been applied to the theory of literature and art, history, linguistics, cognitive sciences, etc. by the teachings of Jean-Marie Grassin et the University of Limoges(v. esp.: J. Fontanille, B. Westphal, J. Vion-Dury, éds. L'Émergence -- Poétique de l'Émergence, en réponse aux travaux de Jean-Marie Grassin, Bern, Berlin, etc., 2011; and: the article "Emergence" in the International Dictionary of Literary Terms (DITL).

See also

• List of literary terms
• List of literary movements
• Dramatic theory
  Dramatic theory
  Dramatic theory is a term used for works that attempt to form theories about theatre and drama. Examples of ancient dramatic theory include Aristotle's Poetics from Ancient Greece and Bharata Muni's Natyasastra from ancient India.- External links :...
  
  
• Critical theory
  Critical theory
  Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...
  
  
• Text (literary theory)
  Text (literary theory)
  A text, within literary theory, is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. This set of symbols is considered in terms of the informative message's content, rather than in terms of its physical form or the medium in which it is represented...
  
  
• School of Resentment
  School of resentment
  School of Resentment is a term coined by critic Harold Bloom to describe related schools of literary criticism which have gained prominence in academia since the 1970s and which Bloom contends are preoccupied with political and social activism at the expense of aesthetic values.Broadly, Bloom terms...
  
  

Further reading

• Carroll, J. (2007). Evolutionary Approaches to Literature and Drama. In Robin Dunbar and Louise Barrett, (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Chapter 44. Full text
• Castle, Gregory. Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
• Culler, Jonathan.
  Jonathan Culler
  Jonathan Culler is a class of 1966 Harvard graduate and Professor of English at Cornell University. He is an important figure of the structuralism movement of literary theory and criticism.- Background and career:...
  
   The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
• Terry Eagleton
  Terry Eagleton
  Terence Francis Eagleton FBA is a British literary theorist and critic, who is regarded as one of Britain's most influential living literary critics...
  
  . Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. (http://www.upress.umn.edu/)
• Literary Theory: An Anthology. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
• Lisa Zunshine
  Lisa Zunshine
  ]Lisa Zunshine is a scholar of 18th-century British literature, whose interests include cultural historicism, narrative theory, and cognitive approaches to literary and cultural studies . She is a Bush-Holbrook professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington...
  
  , ed. Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010

External links

• Aristotle's Poetics (350 BCE)
• Longinus's On the Sublime (1st century CE)
• Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie (1595)
• "A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology", by José Ángel García Landa
• "Some Literary Criticism quotes", by Tim Love
• The Litcrit Toolkit
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a free online encyclopedia on philosophical topics and philosophers founded by James Fieser in 1995. The current general editors are James Fieser and Bradley Dowden...
  
  : "Literary Theory," by Vince Brewton
• Annotated bibliography on literary theory
• David Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners