Literary criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by

literary theory Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Culler 1997, p.1 Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, mo ...

, 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

is a matter of some controversy. For example, the ''Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism'' 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 journal An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and ...

s, 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 ''London Review of Books'' (''LRB'') is a British literary magazine published twice monthly that features articles and essays on fiction and non-fiction subjects, which are usually structured as book reviews. History The ''London Review of ...

'', the '' Dublin Review of Books'', '' The Nation'', '' Bookforum'', and '' The New Yorker''.

History

Classical and medieval criticism

Literary criticism is thought to have existed as far back as the classical period. In the 4th century BC

Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical Greece, Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatet ...

wrote the ''

Poetics Poetics is the theory of structure, form, and discourse within literature, and, in particular, within poetry. History The term ''poetics'' derives from the Ancient Greek ποιητικός ''poietikos'' "pertaining to poetry"; also "creative" an ...

'', 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 Mimesis (; grc, μίμησις, ''mīmēsis'') is a term used in literary criticism and philosophy that carries a wide range of meanings, including ''imitatio'', imitation, nonsensuous similarity, receptivity, representation, mimicry, the act ...

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 The ''Nāṭya Śāstra'' (, ''Nāṭyaśāstra'') is a Sanskrit treatise on the performing arts. The text is attributed to sage Bharata Muni, and its first complete compilation is dated to between 200 BCE and 200 CE, but estimates vary ...

'' includes literary criticism on ancient

Indian literature Indian literature refers to the literature produced on the Indian subcontinent until 1947 and in the Republic of India thereafter. The Republic of India has 22 officially recognised languages. The earliest works of Indian literature were o ...

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. Literary criticism was also employed in other forms of medieval

Arabic literature Arabic literature ( ar, الأدب العربي / ALA-LC: ''al-Adab al-‘Arabī'') is the writing, both as prose and poetry, produced by writers in the Arabic language. The Arabic word used for literature is '' Adab'', which is derived from ...

and

Arabic poetry Arabic poetry ( ar, الشعر العربي ''ash-shi‘ru al-‘Arabīyyu'') is the earliest form of Arabic literature. Present knowledge of poetry in Arabic dates from the 6th century, but oral poetry is believed to predate that. 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 Abdallah ibn al-Mu'tazz ( ar, عبد الله بن المعتز, ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muʿtazz; 861 – 17 December 908) was the son of the caliph al-Mu'tazz and a political figure, but is better known as a leading Arabic poet and the author o ...

in his ''Kitab al-Badi''.

Renaissance criticism

The literary criticism of the Renaissance developed classical ideas of unity of form and content into literary

neoclassicism Neoclassicism (also spelled Neo-classicism) was a Western cultural movement in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that drew inspiration from the art and culture of classical antiquity. Neoclassicism was ...

, 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 Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power ...

translation of

'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

The seventeenth-century witnessed the first full-fledged crisis in modernity of the core critical-aesthetic principles inherited from

classical antiquity Classical antiquity (also the classical era, classical period or classical age) is the period of cultural history between the 8th century BC and the 5th century AD centred on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations ...

, such as proportion, harmony, unity, decorum, that had long governed, guaranteed, and stabilized Western thinking about artworks. 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 The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires includi ...

aesthetic, such as " conceit' (''concetto''), "

wit Wit is a form of intelligent humour, the ability to say or write things that are clever and usually funny. Someone witty is a person who is skilled at making clever and funny remarks. Forms of wit include the quip, repartee, and wisecrack. Form ...

" (''acutezza'', ''ingegno''), and " wonder" (''meraviglia''), were not fully developed in literary theory until the publication of

Emanuele Tesauro Emanuele Tesauro (28 January 1592 – 26 February 1675) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, literary theorist, dramatist, Marinist poet, and historian. Tesauro is remembered chiefly for his seminal work ''Il cannocchiale aristotelico'' ( ...

's ''Il Cannocchiale aristotelico'' (The Aristotelian Telescope) in 1654. This seminal treatise – inspired by Giambattista Marino's epic ''Adone'' and the work of the Spanish Jesuit philosopher

Baltasar Gracián Baltasar Gracián y Morales, S.J. (; 8 January 16016 December 1658), better known as Baltasar Gracián, was a Spanish Jesuit and baroque prose writer and philosopher. He was born in Belmonte, near Calatayud (Aragón). His writings were lauded ...

– 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

In the

Enlightenment period The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment; german: Aufklärung, "Enlightenment"; it, L'Illuminismo, "Enlightenment"; pl, Oświecenie, "Enlightenment"; pt, Iluminismo, "Enlightenment"; es, La Ilustración, "Enlightenment" was an intel ...

(1700s–1800s), literary criticism became more popular. During this time literacy rates started to rise in the public; 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. Reading was no longer viewed solely as educational or as a sacred source of religion; it was a form of entertainment. 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. 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 A superstition is any belief or practice considered by non-practitioners to be irrational or supernatural, attributed to fate or magic, perceived supernatural influence, or fear of that which is unknown. It is commonly applied to beliefs and ...

and prejudice, increasingly diverged from the idealistic control of the Enlightenment theoreticians so that the business of Enlightenment became a business with the Enlightenment. This development – particularly of emergence of entertainment literature – was addressed through an intensification of criticism. Many works of Jonathan Swift, for instance, were criticized including his book ''

Gulliver's Travels ''Gulliver's Travels'', or ''Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships'' is a 1726 prose satire by the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan ...

'', which one critic described as "the detestable story of the Yahoos".

19th-century Romantic criticism

The British

Romantic Romantic may refer to: Genres and eras * The Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement of the 18th and 19th centuries ** Romantic music, of that era ** Romantic poetry, of that era ** Romanticism in science, of that e ...

movement of the early nineteenth century introduced new

aesthetic Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed th ...

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 Sublime may refer to: Entertainment * SuBLime, a comic imprint of Viz Media for BL manga * Sublime (band), an American ska punk band ** ''Sublime'' (album), 1996 * ''Sublime'' (film), a 2007 horror film * SubLime FM, a Dutch radio station dedic ...

. 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'' – that is, "wit" or "humor" of a certain sort – 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

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 New Criticism was a formalist 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 ...

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

In 1957 Northrop Frye published the influential ''

Anatomy of Criticism ''Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays'' ( Princeton University Press, 1957) is a book by Canadian literary critic and theorist Northrop Frye that attempts to formulate an overall view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary ...

''. 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.

Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas (, ; ; born 18 June 1929) is a German social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere. Associated with the Frankfurt School, Habermas's wor ...

in ''Erkenntnis und Interesse'' 968('' 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 expressionsincluding the interpretation of texts which themselves interpret other texts. Ferdinand de Saussure by Jullien Restored

Ferdinand de Saussure by Jullien Restored

In the British and American literary establishment, the

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

, influenced by

structuralism In sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, structuralism is a general theory of culture and methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader ...

, then post-structuralism, and other kinds of

Continental philosophy Continental philosophy is a term used to describe some philosophers and philosophical traditions that do not fall under the umbrella of analytic philosophy. However, there is no academic consensus on the definition of continental philosophy. Pri ...

. 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

Related to other forms of literary criticism, the

history of the book The history of books became an acknowledged academic discipline in the 1980s. Contributors to the discipline include specialists from the fields of textual scholarship, codicology, bibliography, philology, palaeography, art history, social hi ...

is a field of interdisciplinary inquiry drawing on the methods of

bibliography Bibliography (from and ), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from ). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes ''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

Today, approaches based in

and

continental philosophy Continental philosophy is a term used to describe some philosophers and philosophical traditions that do not fall under the umbrella of analytic philosophy. However, there is no academic consensus on the definition of continental philosophy. Pri ...

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. 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'', while some critics influenced by

cultural studies Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the political dynamics of contemporary culture (including popular culture) and its historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices r ...

read popular texts like comic books or pulp/

genre fiction Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is a term used in the book-trade for fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre, in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre. A num ...

. Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and the natural sciences.

Darwinian literary studies Darwinian literary studies (also known as literary Darwinism) is a branch of literary criticism that studies literature in the context of evolution by means of natural selection, including gene-culture coevolution. It represents an emerging trend ...

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 Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films and the film medium. In general, film criticism can be divided into two categories: Journalism, journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, magazines and other popular mass-m ...

or media studies. Some write

intellectual history Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual hist ...

; others bring the results and methods of

social history Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...

to bear on reading literature.

Key texts

The Classical and medieval periods

* Plato: ''Ion'', ''Republic'', ''Cratylus'' *

: ''Poetics'', ''Rhetoric'' *

Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus (; 8 December 65 – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his ...

: ''Art of Poetry'' *

Longinus Longinus () is the name given to the unnamed Roman soldier who pierced the side of Jesus with a lance and who in medieval and some modern Christian traditions is described as a convert to Christianity. His name first appeared in the apocryphal G ...

: ''On the Sublime'' *

Plotinus Plotinus (; grc-gre, Πλωτῖνος, ''Plōtînos''; – 270 CE) was a philosopher in the Hellenistic philosophy, Hellenistic tradition, born and raised in Roman Egypt. Plotinus is regarded by modern scholarship as the founder of Neop ...

: ''On the Intellectual Beauties'' *

St. Augustine Augustine of Hippo ( , ; la, Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430), also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Afri ...

: ''On Christian Doctrine'' *

Boethius Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, commonly known as Boethius (; Latin: ''Boetius''; 480 – 524 AD), was a Roman senator, consul, '' magister officiorum'', historian, and philosopher of the Early Middle Ages. He was a central figure in the t ...

: ''The Consolation of Philosophy'' *

Aquinas Thomas Aquinas, OP (; it, Tommaso d'Aquino, lit=Thomas of Aquino; 1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian Dominican friar and priest who was an influential philosopher, theologian and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism; he is known ...

: ''The Nature and Domain of Sacred Doctrine'' *

Dante Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His '' Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: ...

: ''The Banquet'', ''Letter to Can Grande Della Scala'' *

Boccaccio Giovanni Boccaccio (, , ; 16 June 1313 – 21 December 1375) was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist. Born in the town of Certaldo, he became so well known as a writer that he was some ...

: ''Life of Dante'', ''Genealogy of the Gentile Gods'' *

Christine de Pizan Christine de Pizan or Pisan (), born Cristina da Pizzano (September 1364 – c. 1430), was an Italian poet and court writer for King Charles VI of France and several French dukes. Christine de Pizan served as a court writer in medieval Franc ...

: ''The Book of the City of Ladies'' *

Bharata Muni Bharata Muni ( Hindi: भरत मुनि) was an ancient sage who the musical treatise ''Natya Shastra'' is traditionally attributed to. The work covers ancient Indian dramaturgy and histrionics, especially Sanskrit theatre. Bharata is cons ...

: ''Natya Shastra'' * Rajashekhara: ''Inquiry into Literature'' *

Valmiki Valmiki (; Sanskrit: वाल्मीकि, ) is celebrated as the harbinger-poet in Sanskrit literature. The epic ''Ramayana'', dated variously from the 5th century BCE to first century BCE, is attributed to him, based on the attributi ...

: ''The Invention of Poetry'' (from the ''

Ramayana The ''Rāmāyana'' (; sa, रामायणम्, ) is a Sanskrit epic composed over a period of nearly a millennium, with scholars' estimates for the earliest stage of the text ranging from the 8th to 4th centuries BCE, and later stages e ...

'') *

Anandavardhana Ānandavardhana (c. 820–890 CE) was the author of ''Dhvanyāloka'', or ''A Light on Suggestion'' (''dhvani''), a work articulating the philosophy of "aesthetic suggestion" (''dhvani'', ''vyañjanā''). The philosopher Abhinavagupta (c. 950 – 1 ...

: ''Light on Suggestion'' *

Cao Pi Cao Pi () ( – 29 June 226), courtesy name Zihuan, was the first emperor of the state of Cao Wei in the Three Kingdoms period of China. He was the second son of Cao Cao, a warlord who lived in the late Eastern Han dynasty, but the eldest son ...

: ''A Discourse on Literature'' * Lu Ji: '' Rhymeprose on Literature'' * Liu Xie: '' The Literary Mind'' * Wang Changling: ''A Discussion of Literature and Meaning'' *Sikong Tu: ''The Twenty-Four Classes of Poetry''

The Renaissance period

* Lodovico Castelvetro: ''The ''Poetics'' of Aristotle Translated and Explained'' *

Philip Sidney Philip, also Phillip, is a male given name, derived from the Greek (''Philippos'', lit. "horse-loving" or "fond of horses"), from a compound of (''philos'', "dear", "loved", "loving") and (''hippos'', "horse"). Prominent Philips who popularize ...

: ''An Apology for Poetry'' *

Jacopo Mazzoni Jacopo Mazzoni (Latinized as Jacobus Mazzonius) (27 November 1548 – 10 April 1598) was an Italian philosopher, a professor in Pisa, and friend of Galileo Galilei. His first name is sometimes reported as "Giacomo". Biography Giacopo (Jacopo) ...

: ''On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante'' *

Torquato Tasso Torquato Tasso ( , also , ; 11 March 154425 April 1595) was an Italian poet of the 16th century, known for his 1591 poem ''Gerusalemme liberata'' ( Jerusalem Delivered), in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between ...

: ''Discourses on the Heroic Poem'' *

Francis Bacon Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon led the advancement of both ...

: ''The Advancement of Learning'' *Henry Reynolds (poet), Henry Reynolds: ''Mythomystes'' *John Mandaville: ''Composed in the mid-14th centurymost probably by a french physician''

The Enlightenment period

*Thomas Hobbes: ''Answer to Davenant's preface to ''Gondibert *Pierre Corneille: ''Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place'' *John Dryden: ''An Essay of Dramatic Poesy'' *Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux: ''The Art of Poetry'' *John Locke: ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' *John Dennis (dramatist), John Dennis: ''The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry'' *Alexander Pope: ''An Essay on Criticism'' *Joseph Addison: ''On the Pleasures of the Imagination'' (''Spectator'' essays) *Giambattista Vico: ''The New Science'' *Edmund Burke: ''A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful'' *David Hume: ''Of the Standard of Taste'' *Samuel Johnson: ''On Fiction'', ''Rasselas'', ''Preface to ''Shakespeare *Edward Young: ''Conjectures on Original Composition'' *Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: ''Laocoön'' *Joshua Reynolds: ''Discourses on Art'' *Richard Sharp (politician), Richard "Conversation" Sharp]
Letters & Essays in Prose & Verse
* James Usher :''Clio: or a Discourse on Taste (1767)'' *Denis Diderot: ''The Paradox of Acting'' *Immanuel Kant: ''Critique of Judgment'' *Mary Wollstonecraft: ''A Vindication of the Rights of Woman'' *William 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 Poetry'' *Friedrich Schiller: ''Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man'' *Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel: ''Critical Fragments'', ''Athenaeum Fragments'', ''On Incomprehensibility''

The 19th century

*William Wordsworth: ''Preface to the Second Edition of ''Lyrical Ballads *Anne Louise Germaine de Staël: ''Literature in its Relation to Social Institutions'' *Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling: ''On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature'' *Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ''Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Genius'', ''On the Principles of Genial Criticism'', ''The Statesman's Manual'', ''Biographia Literaria'' *Wilhelm von Humboldt: ''Collected Works'' *John Keats: letters to Benjamin Bailey, George & Thomas Keats, John Taylor, and Richard Woodhouse *Arthur Schopenhauer: ''The World as Will and Idea'' *Thomas Love Peacock: ''The Four Ages of Poetry'' *Percy Bysshe Shelley: ''A Defence of Poetry'' *Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: ''Conversations with Eckermann'', ''Maxim No. 279'' *Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: ''The Philosophy of Fine Art'' * Giacomo Leopardi: ''Zibaldone'' (notebooks) * Francesco De Sanctis ''Critical Essays; History of the Italian Literature'' *Thomas Carlyle: ''Symbols'' *John Stuart Mill: ''What is Poetry?'' *Ralph Waldo Emerson: ''The Poet'' *Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve: ''What Is a Classic?'' *James Russell Lowell: ''A Fable for Critics'' *Edgar Allan Poe: ''The Poetic Principle'' * Matthew Arnold: ''Preface to the 1853 Edition of ''Poems, ''The Function of Criticism at the Present Time'', ''The Study of Poetry'' *Hippolyte Taine: ''History of English Literature and Language'' *Charles Baudelaire: ''The Salon of 1859'' *Karl Marx: ''The German Ideology'', ''Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy'' *Søren Kierkegaard: ''Two Ages: A Literary Review'', ''The Concept of Irony'' *Friedrich Nietzsche: ''The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music'', ''Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense'' *Walter Pater: ''Studies in the History of the Renaissance'' *Émile Zola: ''The Experimental Novel'' *Anatole France: ''The Adventures of the Soul'' *Oscar Wilde: ''The Decay of Lying'' *Stéphane Mallarmé: ''The Evolution of Literature'', ''The Book: A Spiritual Mystery'', ''Mystery in Literature'' *Leo Tolstoy: ''What is Art?''

The 20th century

*Benedetto Croce: ''Aesthetic'' * Antonio Gramsci : ''Prison Notebooks'' * Umberto Eco: ''The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas; The Open Work'' *A. C. Bradley: ''Poetry for Poetry's Sake'' *Sigmund Freud: ''Creative Writers and Daydreaming'' *Ferdinand de Saussure: ''Course in General Linguistics'' *Claude Lévi-Strauss: ''The Structural Study of Myth'' *T. E. Hulme: ''Romanticism and Classicism''; ''Bergson's Theory of Art'' *Walter Benjamin: ''On Language as Such and On the Language of Man'' *Viktor Shklovsky: ''Art as Technique'' *T. S. Eliot: ''Tradition and the Individual Talent''; ''Hamlet and His Problems'' *Irving Babbitt: ''Romantic Melancholy'' *Carl Jung: ''On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry'' *Leon Trotsky: ''The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism'' *Boris Eikhenbaum: ''The Theory of the "Formal Method"'' *Virginia Woolf: ''A Room of One's Own'' *I. A. Richards: ''Practical Criticism'' *Mikhail Bakhtin: ''Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel'' *Georges Bataille: ''The Notion of Expenditure'' *John Crowe Ransom: ''Poetry: A Note in Ontology''; ''Criticism as Pure Speculation'' *R. P. Blackmur: ''A Critic's Job of Work'' *Jacques 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 Freud'' *György Lukács: ''The Ideal of the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois Aesthetics''; ''Art and Objective Truth'' *Paul Valéry: ''Poetry and Abstract Thought'' *Kenneth Burke: ''Literature as Equipment for Living'' *Ernst Cassirer: ''Art'' *W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley: ''The Intentional Fallacy'', ''The Affective Fallacy'' *Cleanth Brooks: ''The Heresy of Paraphrase''; ''Irony as a Principle of Structure'' *Jan Mukařovský: ''Standard Language and Poetic Language'' *Jean-Paul Sartre: ''Why Write?'' *Simone de Beauvoir: ''The Second Sex'' *Ronald Crane: ''Toward a More Adequate Criticism of Poetic Structure'' *Philip Wheelwright: ''The Burning Fountain'' *Theodor Adorno: ''Cultural Criticism and Society''; ''Aesthetic Theory'' *Roman Jakobson: ''The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles'' * Northrop Frye: ''Anatomy of Criticism''; ''The Critical Path'' *Gaston Bachelard: ''The Poetics of Space'' *Ernst Gombrich: ''Art and Illusion'' *Martin Heidegger: ''The Nature of Language''; ''Language in the Poem''; ''Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry'' *E. D. Hirsch, Jr.: ''Objective Interpretation'' *Noam Chomsky: ''Aspects of the Theory of Syntax'' *Jacques Derrida: ''Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'' *Roland Barthes: ''The Structuralist Activity''; ''The Death of the Author'' *Michel Foucault: ''Truth and Power''; ''What Is an Author?''; ''The Discourse on Language'' *Hans Robert Jauss: ''Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory'' *Georges Poulet: ''Phenomenology of Reading'' *Raymond Williams: ''The Country and the City'' *Lionel Trilling: ''The Liberal Imagination''; *Julia Kristeva: ''From One Identity to Another''; ''Women's Time'' *Paul de Man: ''Semiology and Rhetoric''; ''The Rhetoric of Temporality'' *Harold Bloom: ''The Anxiety of Influence''; ''The Dialectics of Poetic Tradition''; ''Poetry, Revisionism, Repression'' *Chinua Achebe: ''Colonialist Criticism'' * Stanley 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 Criticism'' *Elaine Showalter: ''Toward a Feminist Poetics'' *Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: ''Infection in the Sentence''; ''The Madwoman in the Attic'' *Murray Krieger: ''"A Waking Dream": The Symbolic Alternative to Allegory'' *Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: ''Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia'' *René Girard: ''The Sacrificial Crisis'' *Hélène Cixous: ''The Laugh of the Medusa'' *Jonathan Culler: ''Beyond Interpretation'' *Geoffrey Hartman: ''Literary Commentary as Literature'' *Wolfgang Iser: ''The Repertoire'' *Hayden White: ''The Historical Text as Literary Artifact'' *Hans-Georg Gadamer: ''Truth and Method'' *Paul Ricoeur: ''The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling'' *Peter Szondi: ''On Textual Understanding'' *M. H. Abrams: ''How to Do Things with Texts'' *J. Hillis Miller: ''The Critic as Host'' *Clifford Geertz: ''Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought'' *Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: ''The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism'' *Tristan Tzara: ''Unpretentious Proclamation'' *André Breton: ''The Surrealist Manifesto''; ''The Declaration of January 27, 1925'' *Mina Loy: ''Feminist Manifesto'' *Yokomitsu Riichi: ''Sensation and New Sensation'' *Oswald de Andrade: ''Cannibalist Manifesto'' * André Breton, Leon Trotsky and Diego Rivera: ''Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art'' *Hu Shih: ''Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature'' *Octavio Paz: ''The Bow and the Lire''

References

External links

''Dictionary of the History of Ideas'':
Literary Criticism

Award Winners
Internet Public Library: Literary Criticism
Collection of Critical and Biographical Websites

(University of Zaragoza)
How to Do Literary Analysis: An Experimental Reflection Based on the Yellow Wall-Paper
{{DEFAULTSORT:Literary Criticism Literary criticism, Aesthetics New Criticism Interpretation (philosophy)