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Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. [1] Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history , moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning . [ 1 ]
Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates their own, possibly unique, text-related performance. The approach avoids subjectivity or essentialism in descriptions produced through its recognition that reading is determined by textual and also cultural constraints. [3]
Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism or literary theory that, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalytic reading has been practiced since the early development of psychoanalysis itself, and has developed into a heterogeneous interpretive tradition.
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 ...
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.
The empirical study of literature attracts scholarship particularly in the areas of reception and audience studies and in cognitive psychology when it is concerned with questions of reading. In these two areas research and studies based on the framework are steadily growing.
Literary genre studies is a structuralist approach to the study of genre and genre theory in literary theory, film theory, and other cultural theories. The study of a genre in this way examines the structural elements that combine in the telling of a story and finds patterns in collections of stories.
Marxist literary criticism is a theory of literary criticism based on the historical materialism developed by philosopher and economist Karl Marx.Marxist critics argue that even art and literature themselves form social institutions and have specific ideological functions, based on the background and ideology of their authors.