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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 ...
Two schools of formalist literary criticism developed, Russian formalism, and soon after Anglo-American New Criticism. Formalism was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the US at least from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s, especially as embodied in René Wellek and Austin Warren 's Theory of Literature (1948, 1955 ...
Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or "audience") and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author, content, or form of the work.
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.
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.
Archetypal literary criticism is a type of analytical theory that interprets a text by focusing on recurring myths and archetypes (from the Greek archē, "beginning", and typos, "imprint") in the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in literary works.
The word "radical" derives from the Latin word "radix" ("root"). Thus, radical criticism means criticism that goes to the root of things, to the roots of the problem. Revolutionary criticism is criticism that aims to overturn or overthrow an existing idea or state of affairs. Thus, an existing idea may be turned upside down.
Biographical criticism is a form of literary criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the relationship between the author's life and their literary works. [2] Biographical criticism is often associated with historical-biographical criticism , [ 3 ] a critical method that "sees a literary work chiefly, if not exclusively, as a ...