Literary criticism begins in ancient Greece with two opposed positions on the nature and value of poetry — Plato's suspicion and Aristotle's defence. These two positions define a debate that continues through every subsequent period of critical thought.
Plato's critique of poetry, most fully developed in The Republic (Books II, III, and X) and Ion, rests on three related arguments:
Despite his critique, Plato acknowledges poetry's power — he famously calls it "the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry" and says that if poetry can make a case for itself, he would welcome it back into the ideal city.
Aristotle's Poetics is the most influential work of literary criticism in Western history. It responds systematically to Plato's critique, defending poetry as both pleasurable and instructive.
| Concept | Definition / Argument |
|---|---|
| Mimesis (Imitation) | Poetry imitates human action — but imitation is natural to humans and a source of pleasure and learning. We learn from imitations even of unpleasant things (corpses, ugly animals) |
| Catharsis | Tragedy achieves "through pity and fear the proper purgation of these emotions." Debate: does catharsis mean medical purgation (releasing harmful emotions), moral clarification (refining our emotional responses), or intellectual illumination? |
| Hamartia | The tragic hero's error or flaw — not pure wickedness but a mistake (of judgment or character) that initiates the fall |
| Peripeteia / Anagnorisis | Reversal of fortune / Recognition — the two most powerful elements of tragedy, ideally coinciding in a single scene (as in Oedipus Rex) |
| Universality of Poetry | Poetry is more philosophical than history — it deals with what might happen (the universal) rather than what did happen (the particular). This reverses Plato's charge that poetry is less true than reality |
| The Six Elements | In descending order of importance: Plot, Character, Thought, Diction, Song, Spectacle. Plot (mythos) is "the soul of tragedy" |
| Unity of Action | A tragedy must have a beginning, middle, and end — it must be a unified whole, not an episodic sequence. Aristotle emphasises unity of action; the unity of time (24 hours) and place were added by Renaissance critics |
Horace's verse letter on poetic art established the critical vocabulary of the classical tradition. His key formulation is the dual purpose of poetry: aut prodesse aut delectare — "either to profit or to please" — and most famously the combination: omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci — "he has won every vote who has mixed the useful with the sweet." Poetry must both instruct and delight. Horace also established the doctrine of decorum — the requirement that style be appropriate to subject, character, and genre — and the rule of the three unities (action, time, place) that Neo-classical critics would later codify.
On the Sublime (Peri Hypsous) is a rhetorical treatise on the quality of greatness in literature — the hypsos (sublime, height, elevation) that lifts the reader above the ordinary. Longinus identifies five sources of the sublime: great thoughts, strong and inspired emotion, certain figures of thought and speech, noble diction, and dignified and elevated word-arrangement. The sublime is not a product of technical skill alone — it requires greatness of soul in the author. This text is crucial for understanding 18th-century aesthetics, particularly Edmund Burke's and Kant's theories of the sublime.
Sidney's An Apology for Poetry (c. 1579, published 1595) is the first major work of English literary criticism — a Renaissance humanist defence of poetry against the Puritan attacks of Stephen Gosson's School of Abuse (1579). Sidney's argument draws on Aristotle, Horace, and Plato.
Dryden is the first major English critic in the modern sense — his prefaces, dedications, and essays established the practical criticism of English literature as a serious intellectual enterprise. His An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) is a dialogue in which four characters debate the relative merits of classical, French, and English drama — the first extended comparative literary criticism in English.
Dryden also coined the term "the metaphysical poets" (in his criticism of Donne) and established the heroic couplet as the standard medium of English critical verse. His key contribution is the concept of literary tradition — the idea that English literature must be judged against classical and Continental standards while also asserting its own national character.
Pope's verse essay (1711) codifies Neo-classical critical doctrine for English readers. Its key formulations:
Johnson is the greatest English critic of the 18th century — his practical criticism combines classical learning with common sense and psychological insight. His key critical works:
| Work | Key Argument / Contribution |
|---|---|
| Preface to Shakespeare (1765) | Defends Shakespeare against Neo-classical criticism of his violation of the unities — the unities of time and place are not Aristotle's requirements (only unity of action is) and are anyway not essential to dramatic pleasure. Shakespeare is justified by his effect on the audience |
| Lives of the English Poets (1779–81) | First systematic English literary biography; coined "metaphysical poets" as a critical term (intending it as criticism); practical criticism combining life and works |
| Rambler and Idler essays | Moral and critical essays; "Nothing odd will do long" — his suspicion of novelty; the test of time as the criterion of literary value |
The manifesto of English Romanticism — its key claims:
Coleridge's critical autobiography is simultaneously a philosophical work, a literary autobiography, and a sustained critique of Wordsworth's poetic theory. Its most important contributions:
| Concept | Definition |
|---|---|
| Primary / Secondary Imagination | Primary Imagination = the living power of perception, the "echo" of the divine creative act. Secondary Imagination = the poetic faculty, dissolving and recreating materials through will. Both are vital and organic — contrasted with Fancy (mechanical) |
| Imagination vs Fancy | Imagination is organic, creative, unifying — it "struggles to idealise and to unify." Fancy is merely mechanical — it recombines fixed materials according to associative laws without transforming them |
| Suspension of Disbelief | Coleridge's formula for how we engage with supernatural fiction — we suspend our disbelief by accepting the poem's premises as true for the duration of reading, if the poet provides "human interest and a semblance of truth" |
| Critique of Wordsworth | Coleridge accepts much of Wordsworth's theory but argues that the best poetry does NOT use ordinary language — the language of poetry is a distinct and higher medium. He also argues Wordsworth's theoretical claims are inconsistent with his actual poetic practice |
Shelley's Defence responds to Thomas Love Peacock's The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), which argued that poetry had been superseded by science. Shelley's key claims: poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world"; poetry is a "mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted"; the imagination is the great instrument of moral good; poetry is not representational but creative — it participates in the eternal, the infinite, the one.
Arnold's criticism defines the terms of the Victorian debate about literature's social function. His key arguments are covered fully in Section 4 (Non-Fictional Prose). For this section, the critical emphasis:
Pater's aesthetic criticism in The Renaissance (1873) proposed the Conclusion's famous call to "burn always with a hard, gem-like flame" — the aesthetic experience of the moment as the highest value. His method is impressionistic: the critic's task is to record the unique impression made by a work on a sensitive mind. "What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me?" The critic is not objective but supremely subjective — a position that influenced Oscar Wilde's critical writings.
Wilde's critical essays — "The Critic as Artist" (1890), "The Decay of Lying" (1889), "Pen, Pencil, and Poison" (1889) — propose paradoxically that criticism is a higher art form than the work it criticises, and that lying (fiction) is more valuable than truth. Key epigrams:
The New Criticism dominated English and American literary studies from the 1930s through the 1960s. Its founding assumption is that literary texts should be studied as autonomous aesthetic objects — independent of their authors' intentions, their historical contexts, and their readers' responses. "The text itself" is the only legitimate object of critical attention.
| Critic / Work | Key Concept / Argument |
|---|---|
| I.A. Richards — Practical Criticism (1929) | Close reading of unattributed texts; documenting misreadings; the foundations of textual analysis; distinguishing emotive and referential language |
| William Empson — Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) | Ambiguity as a central feature of poetic language — seven types ranging from simple alternative readings to full contradiction; the productive richness of poetic indeterminacy |
| T.S. Eliot — "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) | The impersonality of great poetry; the poet as catalyst; the "objective correlative"; the "dissociation of sensibility" after the 17th century |
| John Crowe Ransom — "Criticism Inc." (1937); The New Criticism (1941) | Named the movement; argued for professional, rigorous, text-centred criticism as opposed to impressionism, historical scholarship, and moral criticism |
| Cleanth Brooks — The Well Wrought Urn (1947) | "The heresy of paraphrase" — a poem's meaning cannot be separated from its form; paraphrasing a poem destroys its meaning; irony and paradox as fundamental poetic modes |
| Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks — Understanding Poetry (1938) | The textbook that institutionalised New Critical close reading in American universities; irony, tension, ambiguity as the central values |
| W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley | "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946) — the author's intention is irrelevant to the meaning of the text. "The Affective Fallacy" (1949) — the reader's emotional response is irrelevant to the evaluation of the text. Both fallacies take the critic away from the text itself |
Structuralism applied Saussurean linguistics to the study of literature and culture — treating texts as systems of signs whose meaning derives from the relationships between elements rather than from any intrinsic quality. If language is a system of differences with no positive terms, then so is literature: a text's meaning derives from its position within a larger system of literary conventions, genres, and codes.
| Critic / Work | Key Argument |
|---|---|
| Vladimir Propp — Morphology of the Folktale (1928) | All Russian folktales share a common narrative structure — 31 "functions" (actions by characters) and 7 character types (hero, villain, donor, helper, princess, dispatcher, false hero). The first structural analysis of narrative |
| Claude Lévi-Strauss — structural anthropology | Myths are structures of binary oppositions — nature/culture, raw/cooked, male/female — that work through the oppositions rather than resolving them. Applied to literary narrative by later structuralists |
| Roland Barthes — S/Z (1970) | Close reading of a Balzac story revealing the five codes through which all narrative is structured: hermeneutic, proairetic, semic, symbolic, cultural. The transition from structuralism to post-structuralism |
| Gérard Genette — Narrative Discourse (1972) | Systematic narratology: the distinction between story (histoire), narrative (récit), and narrating (narration); time (order, duration, frequency); mood (distance, perspective/focalization); voice (who narrates) |
| A.J. Greimas — Actantial Model | All narratives involve six actants (not characters): Subject, Object, Sender, Receiver, Helper, Opponent — a structural grammar of narrative |
| Tzvetan Todorov — The Poetics of Prose (1971) | Narrative grammar; the minimal narrative unit; the move from equilibrium to disequilibrium to restored equilibrium; structuralist poetics as a science |
Post-structuralism emerged in France in the late 1960s as a critique of structuralism's assumption that stable structures underlie cultural phenomena. If structuralism found stable systems, post-structuralism found that those systems are unstable, contradictory, and ultimately undecidable.
Derrida's deconstruction is not a method of criticism but a practice of reading that exposes the way texts undermine their own claims to stable meaning. His key concepts:
| Concept | Definition |
|---|---|
| Différance | A portmanteau of différer (to differ) and différer (to defer) — meaning is produced by difference (Saussure) but is also always deferred, never fully present. There is no final, stable meaning, only an endless chain of signifiers |
| Logocentrism | Western philosophy's privileging of speech over writing, presence over absence, origin over supplement — Derrida deconstructs these hierarchies by showing that the "secondary" term is actually primary |
| The Supplement | Writing is traditionally seen as a supplement to speech (secondary, derived). Derrida shows that speech itself needs the supplement of writing to complete it — the supplement is always already there |
| Binary Oppositions | Western thought is organised around binary oppositions (speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture, man/woman) in which one term is privileged. Deconstruction shows these hierarchies are unstable — the subordinate term always haunts and undermines the dominant one |
| Of Grammatology (1967) | Derrida's foundational text — a critique of the Western privileging of speech (phonocentrism/logocentrism) through a reading of Saussure and Rousseau |
Foucault's work, though not primarily literary criticism, is foundational for Cultural Studies and postcolonial criticism. His key contributions for literary study:
Reader-response criticism shifted the focus from the text (New Criticism) and the author (biographical criticism) to the reader — arguing that meaning is produced in the act of reading, not fixed in the text or intended by the author.
| Critic / Work | Key Argument |
|---|---|
| I.A. Richards — Practical Criticism (1929) | Documented real readers' responses to unattributed poems; the beginning of empirical reader study |
| Louise Rosenblatt — Literature as Exploration (1938) | The "transactional" theory: meaning is produced in the transaction between text and reader; both the text and the reader's "poem" (what they make of the text) matter |
| Wolfgang Iser — The Act of Reading (1978) | The "implied reader" — the reader constructed by the text; "gaps" in the text that the reader fills in; reading as an active, creative process of constructing meaning |
| Stanley Fish — Is There a Text in This Class? (1980) | "Interpretive communities" — readers share interpretive strategies within communities (academic, religious, professional); meaning is produced by interpretive communities, not by individual readers or texts |
| Hans Robert Jauss — aesthetic of reception | "Horizon of expectations" — readers approach texts with expectations formed by their cultural and literary experience; literature's value lies in how it challenges and expands these horizons |
| Critic / Work | Key Argument |
|---|---|
| Virginia Woolf — A Room of One's Own (1929) | Material conditions of literary production; "Judith Shakespeare"; the androgynous mind as the ideal creative state |
| Elaine Showalter — A Literature of Their Own (1977) | Three phases of women's writing: Feminine (imitation of male standards), Feminist (protest), Female (self-discovery). Showalter coined "gynocriticism" — the study of women's writing on its own terms |
| Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar — The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) | The anxiety of authorship for women writers; the "madwoman" as the repressed alter ego of the angel in the house (Bertha Mason / Jane Eyre); reading 19th-century women's writing for its subversive subtext |
| Hélène Cixous — "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1975) | Écriture féminine — a feminine writing that disrupts phallogocentric language; the woman must write herself; writing as a site of feminist resistance |
| Julia Kristeva | The "semiotic" (pre-linguistic, bodily drives) vs the "symbolic" (language, law, the Father). The avant-garde text allows the semiotic to disrupt the symbolic — revolutionary potential of poetic language |
| Approach | Key Arguments |
|---|---|
| Freudian criticism | Literature as the expression of repressed desires and unconscious conflicts; the text as dream-work; Oedipal patterns; the uncanny (unheimlich) — the return of the repressed in the familiar |
| Lacanian criticism | The Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real orders; desire as always-already linguistic; the "lack" constitutive of the subject; literature as a register of the Real that cannot be symbolised |
| Harold Bloom — The Anxiety of Influence (1973) | Every strong poet must overcome the "anxiety of influence" exerted by their predecessors — through "misreading" (clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonisation, askesis, apophrades) that clears creative space |
