The period after World War II saw an unprecedented expansion and diversification of literary theory. The New Criticism's dominance in the 1940s and 1950s gave way — particularly after the upheavals of 1968 — to a cascade of new theoretical frameworks, many imported from Continental Europe: structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxist criticism, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, ecocriticism, and the digital humanities. Each framework asks different questions of literary texts and produces different kinds of knowledge.
The NET tests both the content of these theories (who said what, in which work) and their relationships — how they respond to each other, what they share, and where they diverge. This section is dense with names and concepts; the MCQs will help consolidate the key associations.
Existentialism — the philosophical movement associated with Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir — shaped literary production and criticism in the immediate post-war period. Its central claim: existence precedes essence. There is no pre-given human nature or purpose — we are "condemned to be free" and must create meaning in an indifferent universe.
| Thinker / Work | Key Argument for Literary Study |
|---|---|
| Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) — What is Literature? (1947) | Literature is not neutral — it is an act of commitment (engagement). Prose commits the author to particular meanings; poetry uses language as a thing rather than a sign. The writer must accept responsibility for what their work does in the world |
| Albert Camus (1913–1960) — The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) | The Absurd is the confrontation between the human desire for meaning and the universe's silence. The response is revolt — to continue living and creating in full awareness of the absurdity. The artist is the supreme absurd man |
| Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) — The Second Sex (1949) | Existentialist feminism — woman is defined as "Other" to the male norm; this is not biological but existential — a situation that can be refused and transformed |
Marxist literary theory examines the relationship between literature and the economic and social structures that produce it — how texts reflect, reproduce, or challenge the ideology of the dominant class.
| Critic / Work | Key Argument |
|---|---|
| Georg Lukács (1885–1971) — The Historical Novel (1937); Studies in European Realism | Realism is the highest form of literary art — it reveals the underlying social totality through the interaction of typical characters in historically specific situations. Modernism is decadent because it fragments social reality into subjective experience |
| Lucien Goldmann (1913–1970) — The Hidden God (1955) | "Genetic structuralism" — literary structures correspond to the mental structures of social groups. Pascal's Pensées and Racine's tragedies both express the "tragic vision" of the noblesse de robe — a class without a future |
| Louis Althusser — "A Letter on Art" (1966) | Art is not ideology — it allows us to see, feel, and perceive ideology from the inside. Great art makes us perceive the ideology in which it is embedded from a certain distance |
| Pierre Macherey — A Theory of Literary Production (1966) | Literature is produced (not created) by working on ideological materials — the gaps, silences, and contradictions in a text reveal what ideology cannot say, what it must suppress to maintain its coherence |
| Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) — The Political Unconscious (1981) | "Always historicize!" — all texts must be read in their historical and political context; the political unconscious is the repressed history of class struggle that every text simultaneously expresses and suppresses |
| Terry Eagleton (b. 1943) — Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976); Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) | Accessible Marxist criticism; ideology critique of literary institutions; literature as ideological practice. Literary Theory is the most widely used introduction to the field |
| Raymond Williams — Marxism and Literature (1977) | Dominant/residual/emergent cultures; hegemony applied to literary history; cultural materialism — see Section 7 |
Structuralism's systematic application to literature, culture, and anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s has been covered in Section 8. The key post-war contributions not covered there:
| Thinker / Work | Key Contribution |
|---|---|
| Claude Lévi-Strauss — Structural Anthropology (1958) | Myth as a structure of binary oppositions; the raw and the cooked; applied to literary narrative by structuralists |
| Roland Barthes — Mythologies (1957); S/Z (1970) | Semiotic analysis of popular culture; the readerly vs writerly text distinction in S/Z — see Sections 7 and 8 |
| Umberto Eco — A Theory of Semiotics (1976); The Role of the Reader (1979) | The "open work" — texts that invite multiple interpretations; the model reader; the encyclopaedic nature of cultural codes used in reading |
| Roman Jakobson — functions of language | Six functions of language: Referential, Emotive, Conative, Phatic, Metalingual, Poetic. The Poetic function (focus on the message for its own sake) defines literary language; equivalent to Jakobson's concept of "literariness" |
Post-structuralism has been covered in Section 8 (Derrida, Foucault, Barthes). Additional key figures and concepts for this section:
Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud through Saussurean linguistics transformed psychoanalytic theory and its applications to literary criticism. His key concepts for literary study:
| Concept | Definition for Literary Study |
|---|---|
| The Mirror Stage | The infant's first recognition of itself in the mirror — the beginning of ego formation through misrecognition; the self is always an image, never an authentic presence |
| The Imaginary / Symbolic / Real | Three registers of human experience: Imaginary (images, dyadic relations, the ego); Symbolic (language, the Law, the Father, the Other); Real (that which cannot be symbolised — trauma, death, jouissance) |
| The Unconscious is Structured Like a Language | Lacan's central claim — the unconscious operates through the mechanisms of language (metaphor and metonymy corresponding to Freud's condensation and displacement) |
| Desire and the Other | Desire is always desire for the Other's desire — we desire what we believe the Other desires. Literary texts are structured by this dynamic |
| Applications to literature | The subject in the text, the gaze, the lack at the heart of subjectivity — all applied to reading narrative and drama |
De Man was the leading American deconstructionist — his "rhetorical reading" exposed the way literary texts undermine their own apparent meanings through the operations of figurative language. Blindness and Insight (1971) and Allegories of Reading (1979) are his major critical works. His key argument: literature is characterised by an irreducible tension between grammar (what sentences literally mean) and rhetoric (what they figuratively mean) — a tension that cannot be resolved, only endlessly read.
Postcolonial theory has been substantially covered in Section 7 (Said, Bhabha, Spivak, Fanon) and Section 6 (English in India). The key additional frameworks for this section:
The term "postcolonial" is itself contested — it can mean: (1) after colonialism (a historical periodisation); (2) in opposition to colonialism (a political stance); (3) the condition of societies formed by colonialism, during and after the colonial period. Many critics prefer to hyphenate "post-colonial" to emphasise the temporal (after) dimension, or to avoid the hyphen to emphasise the political (anti-colonial) dimension.
| Concept / Thinker | Key Argument |
|---|---|
| Frantz Fanon — The Wretched of the Earth (1961) | The "national culture" of the decolonising nation — not a pre-colonial return to roots but a new culture forged in the struggle for liberation; the intellectual's role in this process |
| Aimé Césaire — Discourse on Colonialism (1950) | Colonialism is barbarism — Europe has brutalised itself through its colonial practices; Négritude as the assertion of Black African cultural identity against colonial negation |
| Albert Memmi — The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) | The psychology of both coloniser and colonised — the coloniser is also dehumanised by the colonial relationship; the colonised must choose between assimilation and revolt |
| Ngugi wa Thiong'o — Decolonising the Mind (1986) | Language as the primary site of cultural colonisation; the necessity of writing in African languages — see Section 6 |
| Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin — The Empire Writes Back (1989) | The defining study of postcolonial literature; four models of writing back to the imperial centre: abrogation of the English norm, appropriation of English for local purposes, replacing English with a native language, or creating a new hybrid language |
Postmodernism is both a cultural condition (the state of advanced capitalist society after the 1960s) and a set of aesthetic strategies — self-reflexivity, pastiche, parody, the breakdown of the distinction between high and low culture, the questioning of grand narratives, and the embrace of plurality and fragmentation.
| Thinker / Work | Key Argument |
|---|---|
| Jean-François Lyotard — The Postmodern Condition (1979) | "Incredulity towards metanarratives" — postmodernity is defined by the collapse of the grand narratives (Enlightenment progress, Marxist emancipation, Christian salvation) that gave modernity its sense of direction and purpose |
| Jean Baudrillard — Simulacra and Simulation (1981) | In postmodern culture, the distinction between reality and representation has collapsed — we live in a world of "simulacra" (copies without originals) and "hyperreality" (more real than the real). The Gulf War "did not take place" — it was a media simulation |
| Fredric Jameson — Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984) | Postmodernism is the cultural dominant of late capitalism — characterised by the waning of affect, the collapse of historicity, the dominance of pastiche over parody, and the fragmentation of the subject |
| Linda Hutcheon — A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) | "Historiographic metafiction" — postmodern novels that are self-reflexively fictional while also engaging with historical events (Midnight's Children, The French Lieutenant's Woman) |
Queer Theory emerged in the early 1990s from the intersection of feminist theory, gay and lesbian studies, and post-structuralism — particularly Foucault's history of sexuality and Butler's theory of gender performativity.
| Thinker / Work | Key Argument |
|---|---|
| Michel Foucault — The History of Sexuality (1976) | Sexuality is not a natural fact but a historical and discursive construction — the category "homosexual" was invented in the 19th century; sexuality is a site of power/knowledge. The repression of sexuality is itself a form of productive power |
| Judith Butler — Gender Trouble (1990); Bodies That Matter (1993) | Gender performativity — gender is constituted through repeated acts, not an expression of a prior identity; the heterosexual matrix naturalises binary gender; drag and camp as modes of denaturalising it — see Section 7 |
| Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick — Between Men (1985); Epistemology of the Closet (1990) | "Homosocial desire" — male-male bonds in English literature that are simultaneously homoerotic and homophobic; the "closet" as the defining structure of modern homosexual existence; the binary homo/heterosexual as the organising principle of modern Western culture |
| Diana Fuss — Essentially Speaking (1989) | The essentialism/constructionism debate in feminist and queer theory — is gender/sexuality a biological essence or a social construction? Fuss argues the opposition is not stable |
Ecocriticism — the study of the relationship between literature and the natural environment — emerged as a formal discipline in the 1990s and has become increasingly important in the context of the climate crisis. Its foundational question: what is the relationship between literary representations of nature and actual environmental attitudes and practices?
| Concept / Thinker | Key Argument |
|---|---|
| Cheryll Glotfelty — Introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader (1996) | Ecocriticism is "the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" — the field's founding manifesto; earth-centred approach to literary studies |
| Lawrence Buell — The Environmental Imagination (1995) | Thoreau as the founding text of American ecocriticism; the "environmental imagination" — the capacity to conceive of the natural world as a subject rather than object; criteria for an "environmentally oriented" text |
| Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral | The pastoral tradition (idealising rural/natural life) has been critiqued for concealing labour and social relations; the anti-pastoral exposes what pastoral conceals |
| Timothy Morton — Ecology Without Nature (2007); Dark Ecology (2016) | The concept of "nature" is itself an ideological construction that distances humans from the ecological reality they are part of; "dark ecology" — an ecological thinking without the idealisation of "Nature" |
| Darryl Jones and Rob Nixon — Slow Violence | "Slow violence" — the gradual, incremental environmental damage (pollution, climate change, deforestation) that is invisible because it unfolds over time rather than in dramatic events; the challenge of representing it in narrative |
New Historicism emerged in American Renaissance studies in the 1980s, particularly associated with Stephen Greenblatt. It rejected both the New Critical isolation of the literary text from history and the Marxist subordination of literature to economic base — arguing instead that literary texts and non-literary texts of the same period should be read together as participants in a shared cultural negotiation of power.
| Concept / Thinker | Key Argument |
|---|---|
| Stephen Greenblatt — Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980); Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) | "Self-fashioning" — the construction of personal identity in Renaissance culture through negotiation with authority; "social energy" — the circulation of power through cultural texts and non-literary documents alike |
| Louis Montrose | "The historicity of texts and the textuality of history" — all texts are historical documents; all historical documents are texts requiring reading. New Historicism's double motto |
| Cultural Materialism — Raymond Williams, Alan Sinfield, Jonathan Dollimore | British parallel to New Historicism; more explicitly political; focuses on how cultural texts are used and contested in the present as well as their past context; Shakespeare as a site of ideological struggle in contemporary culture |
Disability Studies in literary criticism examines how literary texts represent disability, how disability shapes narrative structure (the "stricken hero," the freak, the invalid), and how disabled readers experience literature. Key distinction: the medical model (disability as individual deficit requiring cure) vs the social model (disability as the product of social barriers and attitudes, not individual bodies).
The posthumanist turn in literary theory questions the boundary between the human and the non-human — animals, machines, and the environment. Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and Staying with the Trouble (2016) are key texts, as is Cary Wolfe's Animal Rites (2003). Literary criticism asks: how are animals represented in literature? What does the animal figure do ideologically? What would it mean to read literature from an animal's perspective?
Digital Humanities applies computational methods to literary and cultural study — text mining, corpus analysis, network analysis, digital editions, and distant reading.
| Term | Associated Thinker(s) | Brief Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Engagement (engagement) | Sartre | The writer's commitment to the political and social consequences of their work |
| The Absurd | Camus | The confrontation between human desire for meaning and the universe's silence |
| Political unconscious | Jameson | The repressed history of class struggle expressed and suppressed in every text |
| Simulacrum / Hyperreality | Baudrillard | A copy without an original; reality replaced by its media representation |
| Metanarrative / Grand narrative | Lyotard | A large-scale legitimating narrative (Progress, Revolution, Salvation) — postmodernity is its collapse |
| Historiographic metafiction | Hutcheon | Postmodern fiction that is self-reflexive AND historically engaged |
| Homosocial desire | Sedgwick | The erotic dimension of male-male bonds in literature and culture |
| Négritude | Césaire, Senghor | The assertion of Black African cultural identity against colonial negation |
| Slow violence | Rob Nixon | Gradual, incremental environmental damage invisible because it unfolds over time |
| Distant reading | Moretti | Computational, statistical analysis of large literary corpora |
| Social energy | Greenblatt | The circulation of cultural power through literary and non-literary texts |
| Self-fashioning | Greenblatt | The construction of personal identity through cultural negotiation with authority |
