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In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as meter and tropes. The formalistic approach reduces the importance of a text's historical, biographical, and cultural context.
New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools of the US North, which focused on the history and meaning of individual words and their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources, and the biographical circumstances of the authors, taking this approach under the influence of nineteenth-century German scholarship.
Ivor Armstrong Richards CH (26 February 1893 [1] – 7 September 1979 [1]), known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, poet, and rhetorician.His work contributed to the foundations of New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions ...
The first direction is the Russian Formalist's approach which assumes that there is a difference between literary and ordinary texts with features specific to literary language. The second approach rejects this assumption, as those linguistic features can be found in any other instance of language use.
A characteristic stance of formalist approaches is the primacy of form (like syntax), and the conception of language as a system in isolation from the outer world. An example of this is de Saussure's principle of arbitrariness of sign, according to which there is no intrinsic relationship between a signifier (a word) and the signified (concept ...
Semiotic literary criticism, also called literary semiotics, is the approach to literary criticism informed by the theory of signs or semiotics.Semiotics, tied closely to the structuralism pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, was extremely influential in the development of literary theory out of the formalist approaches of the early twentieth century.
In Richards and Leavis' attempt to establish a new and rigorous approach to literary analysis, they turned to Russell's redefinition of the task of philosophy, which is the logical analysis of language. [11] G. Wilson Knight, in his criticism of the nineteenth-century notion of character, further contributed to the refinement of Cambridge ...
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 criticism derived exclusively from literature. Frye consciously omits all specific and practical criticism ...