New Criticism
New Criticism,the dominant form of academic literary criticism in the USA and UK between about 1940 and 1970, characterized by close readings of decontextualized literary texts and an aesthetics of complex meaning, irony, and unity under tension. The term is most properly applied to the American variant developed at Vanderbilt University by John Crowe Ransome, Cleanth Brooks, Alan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and others, but these critics had in turn been influenced by ideas of T. S. Eliot and the ‘practical criticism’ developed at Cambridge by I. A. Richards and William Empson. Their ideas and methods closely parallel the independently developed criticism of F. R. Leavis and his followers in the UK, now often also called New Critical in consequence. New Criticism in this broad sense spread throughout academia after about 1955 and waned markedly after 1970. Shakespeare was a major figure for New Criticism from the beginning, for example, in the famous essay...
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