literary criticism, the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as a term, to any argumentation about literature, whether or not specific works are analyzed.

From this period until the later part of the 18th century Aristotle was once again the most imposing presence behind literary theory. Critics looked to ancient poems and plays for insight into the permanent laws of art.

Literary criticism - Analysis, Interpretation, Theory: The debate over poetic truth may illustrate how modern discussion is beholden to extraliterary knowledge. Critics have never ceased disputing whether literature depicts the world correctly, incorrectly, or not at all, and the dispute has often had more to do with the support or condemnation ...

2024年11月25日 · Literary criticism - Theory, Analysis, Interpretation: The ideal of objective research has continued to guide Anglo-American literary scholarship and criticism and has prompted work of unprecedented accuracy.

New Criticism, post-World War I school of Anglo-American literary critical theory that insisted on the intrinsic value of a work of art and focused attention on the individual work alone as an independent unit of meaning. It was opposed to the critical practice of bringing historical or biographical data to bear on the interpretation of a work.

F.R. Leavis was an English literary critic who championed seriousness and moral depth in literature and criticized what he considered the amateur belletrism of his time. Leavis attended Cambridge University and then served throughout World War I …

Freudian criticism, literary criticism that uses the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud to interpret a work in terms of the known psychological conflicts of its author or, conversely, to construct the author’s psychic life from unconscious revelations in his work.

The decline of Neoclassicism is hardly surprising; literary theory had developed very little during two centuries of artistic, political, and scientific ferment. The 18th century’s important new genre, the novel, drew most of its readers from a bourgeoisie that had little use for aristocratic dicta. A Longinian cult of “feeling” gradually ...

Formalism, innovative 20th-century Russian school of literary criticism. It began in two groups: OPOYAZ, an acronym for Russian words meaning Society for the Study of Poetic Language, founded in 1916 at St. Petersburg (later Leningrad) and led by Viktor Shklovsky; and the Moscow Linguistic Circle,

Longinus is sometimes assigned as the author of On the Sublime (Greek Peri Hypsous), one of the great seminal works of literary criticism. The earliest surviving manuscript, from the 10th century, first printed in 1554, ascribes it to Dionysius Longinus.