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Introduction

Aristotle

Jacques Derrida

Harold Bloom

The phrase “literary theory” may sound scary, but it simply means the interpretation and evaluation of literature. Aristotle is said to have originated this field of study. He concentrated on discovering the author’s intent in the work that may not be obvious from the words on the printed page. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, theorists of the Romantic era focused on interpreting social and psychological factors in literature. By the twentieth century, politics became an important component of literary theory, and many argued that writers could never be free of their cultural and environmental influences. Some schools of literary theory include New Criticism, which looks for degrees of “honesty” in a literary work; Marxism, which considers class-conflict as paramount; New Historicism, which compares a work to other works of the same time period; and Gender Theory and Queer Theory, which consider specific groups in relation to literature.

Essential Facts

1. Aristotle believed that an author’s intent could be understood by examining seven different causes: “chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.”
2. Many of the great poets of the Romantic era were also closet literary theorists. Percy Bysse Shelley said that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the World,” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that “unity is imposed by the individual creative imagination.”
3. New Critics argue for multiple interpretations of a text and that there is no such thing as “one true meaning.”
4. One of the most prominent members of the school of New Historicism is Michel Foucault, who believed that the desire for power infects all literature to some extent.
5. Harold Bloom is arguably the best-known critic and literary theorist of the twentieth century and today. Bloom advocates an “aesthetic” approach to theory—evaluating literature as an art form that appeals to the senses.