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Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature’s goals and methods. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory is a matter of some controversy. For example, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism[1] draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism, and almost always uses the terms together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary criticism a practical application of literary theory, because criticism always deals directly with particular literary works, while theory may be more general or abstract.Literary criticism is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in literature departments and publish in academic journals, and more popular critics publish their reviews in broadly circulating periodicals such as The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Dublin Review of Books, The Nation, Bookforum, and The New Yorker.       (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});after-content-x4Table of ContentsHistory[edit]Classical and medieval criticism[edit]Renaissance criticism[edit]Baroque criticism[edit]Enlightenment criticism[edit]19th-century Romantic criticism[edit]The New Criticism[edit]Theory[edit]History of the book[edit]Current state[edit]Key texts[edit]The Classical and medieval periods[edit]The Renaissance period[edit]The Enlightenment period[edit]The 19th century[edit]The 20th century[edit]See also[edit]References[edit]External links[edit]History[edit]Classical and medieval criticism[edit]Literary criticism is thought to have existed as far back as the classical period.[2] In the 4th century BC Aristotle wrote the Poetics, a typology and description of literary forms with many specific criticisms of contemporary works of art. Poetics developed for the first time the concepts of mimesis and catharsis, which are still crucial in literary studies. Plato’s attacks on poetry as imitative, secondary, and false were formative as well. The Sanskrit Natya Shastra includes literary criticism on ancient Indian literature and Sanskrit drama.Later classical and medieval criticism often focused on religious texts, and the several long religious traditions of hermeneutics and textual exegesis have had a profound influence on the study of secular texts. This was particularly the case for the literary traditions of the three Abrahamic religions: Jewish literature, Christian literature and Islamic literature.       (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});after-content-x4Literary criticism was also employed in other forms of medieval Arabic literature and Arabic poetry from the 9th century, notably by Al-Jahiz in his al-Bayan wa-‘l-tabyin and al-Hayawan, and by Abdullah ibn al-Mu’tazz in his Kitab al-Badi.[3]Renaissance criticism[edit]The literary criticism of the Renaissance developed classical ideas of unity of form and content into literary neoclassicism, proclaiming literature as central to culture, entrusting the poet and the author with preservation of a long literary tradition. The birth of Renaissance criticism was in 1498, with the recovery of classic texts, most notably, Giorgio Valla’s Latin translation of Aristotle’s Poetics. The work of Aristotle, especially Poetics, was the most important influence upon literary criticism until the late eighteenth century. Lodovico Castelvetro was one of the most influential Renaissance critics who wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics in 1570.Baroque criticism[edit]The seventeenth-century  witnessed the first full-fledged crisis in modernity of the core critical-aesthetic principles inherited from classical antiquity, such as proportion, harmony, unity, decorum, that had long governed, guaranteed, and stabilized Western thinking about artworks.[4] Although Classicism was very far from spent as a cultural force, it was to be gradually challenged by a rival movement, namely Baroque, that favoured the transgressive and the extreme, without laying claim to the unity, harmony, or decorum that supposedly distinguished both nature and its greatest imitator, namely ancient art. The key concepts of the Baroque aesthetic, such as “conceit’ (concetto), “wit” (acutezza, ingegno), and “wonder” (meraviglia), were not fully developed in literary theory until the publication of Emanuele Tesauro’s Il Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope) in 1654. This seminal treatise \u2013 inspired by Giambattista Marino’s epic Adone and the work of the Spanish Jesuit philosopher Baltasar Graci\u00e1n \u2013 developed a theory of metaphor as a universal language of images and as a supreme intellectual act, at once an artifice and an epistemologically privileged mode of access to truth.Enlightenment criticism[edit]  In the Enlightenment period (1700s\u20131800s), literary criticism became more popular. During this time literacy rates started to rise in the public;[5] no longer was reading exclusive for the wealthy or scholarly. With the rise of the literate public, the swiftness of printing and commercialization of literature, criticism arose too.[6] Reading was no longer viewed solely as educational or as a sacred source of religion; it was a form of entertainment.[7] Literary criticism was influenced by the values and stylistic writing, including clear, bold, precise writing and the more controversial criteria of the author’s religious beliefs.[8] These critical reviews were published in many magazines, newspapers, and journals. The commercialization of literature and its mass production had its downside. The emergent literary market, which was expected to educate the public and keep them away from superstition and prejudice, increasingly diverged from the idealistic control of the Enlightenment theoreticians so that the business of Enlightenment became a business with the Enlightenment.[9] This development \u2013 particularly of emergence of entertainment literature \u2013 was addressed through an intensification of criticism.[9] Many works of Jonathan Swift, for instance, were criticized including his book Gulliver’s Travels, which one critic described as “the detestable story of the Yahoos”.[8]19th-century Romantic criticism[edit]The British Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century introduced new aesthetic ideas to literary studies, including the idea that the object of literature need not always be beautiful, noble, or perfect, but that literature itself could elevate a common subject to the level of the sublime. German Romanticism, which followed closely after the late development of German classicism, emphasized an aesthetic of fragmentation that can appear startlingly modern to the reader of English literature, and valued Witz \u2013 that is, “wit” or “humor” of a certain sort \u2013 more highly than the serious Anglophone Romanticism. The late nineteenth century brought renown to authors known more for their literary criticism than for their own literary work, such as Matthew Arnold.The New Criticism[edit]However important all of these aesthetic movements were as antecedents, current ideas about literary criticism derive almost entirely from the new direction taken in the early twentieth century. Early in the century the school of criticism known as Russian Formalism, and slightly later the New Criticism in Britain and in the United States, came to dominate the study and discussion of literature in the English-speaking world. Both schools emphasized the close reading of texts, elevating it far above generalizing discussion and speculation about either authorial intention (to say nothing of the author’s psychology or biography, which became almost taboo subjects) or reader response. This emphasis on form and precise attention to “the words themselves” has persisted, after the decline of these critical doctrines themselves.Theory[edit]In 1957 Northrop Frye published the influential Anatomy of Criticism. In his works Frye noted that some critics tend to embrace an ideology, and to judge literary pieces on the basis of their adherence to such ideology. This has been a highly influential viewpoint among modern conservative thinkers. E. Michael Jones, for example, argues in his Degenerate Moderns that Stanley Fish was influenced by his own adulterous affairs to reject classic literature that condemned adultery.[10]J\u00fcrgen Habermas in Erkenntnis und Interesse [1968] (Knowledge and Human Interests), described literary critical theory in literary studies as a form of hermeneutics: knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions\u00a0\u2013 including the interpretation of texts which themselves interpret other texts.  In the British and American literary establishment, the New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s. Around that time Anglo-American university literature departments began to witness a rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory, influenced by structuralism, then post-structuralism, and other kinds of Continental philosophy. It continued until the mid-1980s, when interest in “theory” peaked. Many later critics, though undoubtedly still influenced by theoretical work, have been comfortable simply interpreting literature rather than writing explicitly about methodology and philosophical presumptions.History of the book[edit]Related to other forms of literary criticism, the history of the book is a field of interdisciplinary inquiry drawing on the methods of bibliography, cultural history, history of literature, and media theory. Principally concerned with the production, circulation, and reception of texts and their material forms, book history seeks to connect forms of textuality with their material aspects.Among the issues within the history of literature with which book history can be seen to intersect are: the development of authorship as a profession, the formation of reading audiences, the constraints of censorship and copyright, and the economics of literary form.Current state[edit]Today, approaches based in literary theory and continental philosophy largely coexist in university literature departments, while conventional methods, some informed by the New Critics, also remain active. Disagreements over the goals and methods of literary criticism, which characterized both sides taken by critics during the “rise” of theory, have declined. Many critics feel that they now have a great plurality of methods and approaches from which to choose.[citation needed]Some critics work largely with theoretical texts, while others read traditional literature; interest in the literary canon is still great, but many critics are also interested in nontraditional texts and women’s literature, as elaborated on by certain academic journals such as Contemporary Women’s Writing,[11] while some critics influenced by cultural studies read popular texts like comic books or pulp\/genre fiction. Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and the natural sciences. Darwinian literary studies studies literature in the context of evolutionary influences on human nature. And postcritique has sought to develop new ways of reading and responding to literary texts that go beyond the interpretive methods of critique. Many literary critics also work in film criticism or media studies. Some write intellectual history; others bring the results and methods of social history to bear on reading literature.[citation needed]Key texts[edit]The Classical and medieval periods[edit]The Renaissance period[edit]The Enlightenment period[edit]Thomas Hobbes: Answer to Davenant’s preface to GondibertPierre Corneille: Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and PlaceJohn Dryden: An Essay of Dramatic PoesyNicolas Boileau-Despr\u00e9aux: The Art of PoetryJohn Locke: An Essay Concerning Human UnderstandingJohn Dennis: The Advancement and Reformation of Modern PoetryAlexander Pope: An Essay on CriticismJoseph Addison: On the Pleasures of the Imagination (Spectator essays)Giambattista Vico: The New ScienceEdmund Burke: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the BeautifulDavid Hume: Of the Standard of TasteSamuel Johnson: On Fiction, Rasselas, Preface to ShakespeareEdward Young: Conjectures on Original CompositionGotthold Ephraim Lessing: Laoco\u00f6nJoshua Reynolds: Discourses on ArtRichard “Conversation” Sharp Letters & Essays in Prose & VerseJames Usher\u00a0:Clio: or a Discourse on Taste (1767)[12]Denis Diderot: The Paradox of ActingImmanuel Kant: Critique of JudgmentMary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of WomanWilliam Blake: The Marriage of Heaven or Hell, Letter to Thomas Butts, Annotations to Reynolds’ Discourses, A Descriptive Catalogue, A Vision of the Last Judgment, On Homer’s PoetryFriedrich Schiller: Letters on the Aesthetic Education of ManFriedrich Schlegel: Critical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments, On IncomprehensibilityThe 19th century[edit]William Wordsworth: Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical BalladsAnne Louise Germaine de Sta\u00ebl: Literature in its Relation to Social InstitutionsFriedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling: On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to NatureSamuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to His Genius, On the Principles of Genial Criticism, The Statesman’s Manual, Biographia LiterariaWilhelm von Humboldt: Collected WorksJohn Keats: letters to Benjamin Bailey, George & Thomas Keats, John Taylor, and Richard WoodhouseArthur Schopenhauer: The World as Will and IdeaThomas Love Peacock: The Four Ages of PoetryPercy Bysshe Shelley: A Defence of PoetryJohann Wolfgang von Goethe: Conversations with Eckermann, Maxim No. 279Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Philosophy of Fine ArtGiacomo Leopardi: Zibaldone (notebooks)Francesco De Sanctis Critical Essays; History of the Italian LiteratureThomas Carlyle: SymbolsJohn Stuart Mill: What is Poetry?Ralph Waldo Emerson: The PoetCharles Augustin Sainte-Beuve: What Is a Classic?James Russell Lowell: A Fable for CriticsEdgar Allan Poe: The Poetic PrincipleMatthew Arnold: Preface to the 1853 Edition of Poems, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, The Study of PoetryHippolyte Taine: History of English Literature and LanguageCharles Baudelaire: The Salon of 1859Karl Marx: The German Ideology, Contribution to the Critique of Political EconomyS\u00f8ren Kierkegaard: Two Ages: A Literary Review, The Concept of IronyFriedrich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral SenseWalter Pater: Studies in the History of the Renaissance\u00c9mile Zola: The Experimental NovelAnatole France: The Adventures of the SoulOscar Wilde: The Decay of LyingSt\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9: The Evolution of Literature, The Book: A Spiritual Mystery, Mystery in LiteratureLeo Tolstoy: What is Art?The 20th century[edit]Benedetto Croce: AestheticAntonio Gramsci\u00a0: Prison NotebooksUmberto Eco: The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas; The Open WorkA. C. Bradley: Poetry for Poetry’s SakeSigmund Freud: Creative Writers and DaydreamingFerdinand de Saussure: Course in General LinguisticsClaude L\u00e9vi-Strauss: The Structural Study of MythT. E. Hulme: Romanticism and Classicism; Bergson’s Theory of ArtWalter Benjamin: On Language as Such and On the Language of ManViktor Shklovsky: Art as TechniqueT. S. Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent; Hamlet and His ProblemsIrving Babbitt: Romantic MelancholyCarl Jung: On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to PoetryLeon Trotsky: The Formalist School of Poetry and MarxismBoris Eikhenbaum: The Theory of the “Formal Method”Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s OwnI. A. Richards: Practical CriticismMikhail Bakhtin: Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the NovelGeorges Bataille: The Notion of ExpenditureJohn Crowe Ransom: Poetry: A Note in Ontology; Criticism as Pure SpeculationR. P. Blackmur: A Critic’s Job of WorkJacques Lacan: The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience; The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since FreudGy\u00f6rgy Luk\u00e1cs: The Ideal of the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois Aesthetics; Art and Objective TruthPaul Val\u00e9ry: Poetry and Abstract ThoughtKenneth Burke: Literature as Equipment for LivingErnst Cassirer: ArtW. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley: The Intentional Fallacy, The Affective FallacyCleanth Brooks: The Heresy of Paraphrase; Irony as a Principle of StructureJan Muka\u0159ovsk\u00fd: Standard Language and Poetic LanguageJean-Paul Sartre: Why Write?Simone de Beauvoir: The Second SexRonald Crane: Toward a More Adequate Criticism of Poetic StructurePhilip Wheelwright: The Burning FountainTheodor Adorno: Cultural Criticism and Society; Aesthetic TheoryRoman Jakobson: The Metaphoric and Metonymic PolesNorthrop Frye: Anatomy of Criticism; The Critical PathGaston Bachelard: The Poetics of SpaceErnst Gombrich: Art and IllusionMartin Heidegger: The Nature of Language; Language in the Poem; H\u00f6lderlin and the Essence of PoetryE. D. Hirsch, Jr.: Objective InterpretationNoam Chomsky: Aspects of the Theory of SyntaxJacques Derrida: Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human SciencesRoland Barthes: The Structuralist Activity; The Death of the AuthorMichel Foucault: Truth and Power; What Is an Author?; The Discourse on LanguageHans Robert Jauss: Literary History as a Challenge to Literary TheoryGeorges Poulet: Phenomenology of ReadingRaymond Williams: The Country and the CityLionel Trilling: The Liberal Imagination;Julia Kristeva: From One Identity to Another; Women’s TimePaul de Man: Semiology and Rhetoric; The Rhetoric of TemporalityHarold Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence; The Dialectics of Poetic Tradition; Poetry, Revisionism, RepressionChinua Achebe: Colonialist CriticismStanley Fish: Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes Without Saying, and Other Special Cases; Is There a Text in This Class?Edward Said: The World, the Text, and the Critic; Secular CriticismElaine Showalter: Toward a Feminist PoeticsSandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: Infection in the Sentence; The Madwoman in the AtticMurray Krieger: “A Waking Dream”: The Symbolic Alternative to AllegoryGilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and SchizophreniaRen\u00e9 Girard: The Sacrificial CrisisH\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cixous: The Laugh of the MedusaJonathan Culler: Beyond InterpretationGeoffrey Hartman: Literary Commentary as LiteratureWolfgang Iser: The RepertoireHayden White: The Historical Text as Literary ArtifactHans-Georg Gadamer: Truth and MethodPaul Ricoeur: The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and FeelingPeter Szondi: On Textual UnderstandingM. H. Abrams: How to Do Things with TextsJ. Hillis Miller: The Critic as HostClifford Geertz: Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social ThoughtFilippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Foundation and Manifesto of FuturismTristan Tzara: Unpretentious ProclamationAndr\u00e9 Breton: The Surrealist Manifesto; The Declaration of January 27, 1925Mina Loy: Feminist ManifestoYokomitsu Riichi: Sensation and New SensationOswald de Andrade: Cannibalist ManifestoAndr\u00e9 Breton, Leon Trotsky and Diego Rivera: Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary ArtHu Shih: Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of LiteratureOctavio Paz: The Bow and the LireSee also[edit]This audio file was created from a revision of this article dated 18\u00a0October\u00a02006\u00a0(2006-10-18), and does not reflect subsequent edits.References[edit]^ Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2nd\u00a0ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. ISBN\u00a0978-0-8018-8010-0. OCLC\u00a054374476.^ “Literary Theory | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy”. Retrieved 1 December 2020.^ van. Gelder, G. J. H. (1982). Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem. Leiden: Brill Publishers. pp.\u00a01\u20132. ISBN\u00a0978-90-04-06854-4. OCLC\u00a010350183.^ Jon R. Snyder, L\u2019estetica del Barocco (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), 21\u201322.^ Van Horn Melton, James (2001). The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p.\u00a082. ISBN\u00a0978-0-521-46573-1.^ Voskuhl, Adelheid (2013). Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp.\u00a071\u201372. ISBN\u00a0978-0-226-03402-7.^ Murray, Stuart (2009). The Library: An Illustrated History. New York: Skyhorse. pp.\u00a0132\u2013133. ISBN\u00a0978-1-61608-453-0. OCLC\u00a0277203534.^ a b Regan, Shaun; Dawson, Books (2013). Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Lewisburg [Pa.]: Bucknell University Press. pp.\u00a0125\u2013130. ISBN\u00a0978-1-61148-478-6.^ a b Hohendahl, Peter Uwe; Berghahn, Klaus L. (1988). A History of German Literary Criticism: 173\u20131980. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. p.\u00a025. ISBN\u00a0978-0-8032-7232-3.^ Jones, E. Michael (1991). Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehaviour. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. pp.\u00a079\u201384. ISBN\u00a0978-0-89870-447-1. OCLC\u00a028241358.^ “Contemporary Women’s Writing | Oxford Academic”. OUP Academic. Retrieved 1 August 2019.^ Ussher, J. (1767). Clio Or, a Discourse on Taste: Addressed to a Young Lady. Davies. p.\u00a03. 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