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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 ]
Theory of Literature is a book on literary scholarship by René Wellek, of the structuralist Prague school, and Austin Warren, a self-described "old New Critic". [1] The two met at the University of Iowa in the late 1930s, and by 1940 had begun writing the book; they wrote collaboratively, in a single voice over a period of three years.
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.
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 approach avoids subjectivity or essentialism in descriptions produced through its recognition that reading is determined by textual and also cultural constraints. [3] It stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism and the New Criticism , in which the reader's role in re-creating literary works is ignored. [ 5 ]
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.
Others schools of thought such as gynocriticism—which is considered a 'female' perspective on women's writings—uses a historicist approach to literature by exposing exemplary female scholarship in literature and the ways in which their relation to gender structure relayed in their portrayal of both fiction and reality in their texts ...