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.
 

Recommended Resources

  1. Aristotle's Poetics
  2. Criticism from Plato to Eliot (Critical Survey of Poetry)
  3. Jacques Derrida (Contemporary Literary Criticism)
  4. Postcolonialism Literary Theory
  5. Romantic Literary Criticism

All Resources

Display as: Categories, List
  1. American Literary Criticism in the Nineteenth Century
  2. Aristotle (Encyclopedia of the Ancient World)
  3. Aristotle's Poetics
  4. Baconian Theory
  5. Criticism from Plato to Eliot (Critical Survey of Poetry)
  6. Deconstruction (The Oxford Companion to English Literature)
  7. English Poetry in the Sixteenth Century
  8. Feminist Literary Criticism
  9. Ferdinand de Saussure (Dictionary of World Biography: The 20th Century)
  10. Guide to Literary Terms Study Guide (eNotes)
  11. Harold Bloom
  12. Harold Bloom (Contemporary Literary Criticism)
  13. Harold Bloom (Contemporary Literary Criticism: Vol. 103)
  14. Italian Romantic Theory
  15. Jacques Derrida (Contemporary Literary Criticism)
  16. Language in Literature (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
  17. Longinus
  18. Longinus (Encyclopedia of the Ancient World)
  19. Marxist criticism (The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare)
  20. Marxist literary criticism (The Oxford Companion to English Literature)
  21. Michel Foucault
  22. Michel Foucault (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
  23. Mikhail Bakhtin
  24. Mikhail Bakhtin (World Philosophers and Their Works)
  25. On the Sublime (Masterplots, Revised Second Edition)
  26. ourse in General Linguistics (World Philosophers and Their Works)
  27. Oxfordian Theory on Shakespeare
  28. Plato's Republic Study Guide (eNotes) - Plato
  29. Poetics (Magill Book Reviews)
  30. Postcolonialism Literary Theory
  31. Postcolonialism Literary Theory by Arif Dirlik
  32. Postcolonialism Literary Theory by Arnold Krupat
  33. Postmodern Literary Theory
  34. Reader-Response Theory
  35. Roman Jakobson (Dictionary of World Biography: The 20th Century)
  36. Romantic Literary Criticism
  37. Ruin the Sacred Truths (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
  38. Semiotics
  39. Stanley Fish
  40. The Dialogic Imagination (World Philosophers and Their Works)
  41. The New Criticism (Masterplots, Definitive Revised Edition)
  42. The New Criticism (Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism)
  43. Theory of Short Fiction
  44. Victorian Critical Theory