intentionality

intentionality, in modern literary theory, the study of authorial intention in a literary work and its corresponding relevance to textual interpretation. With the ascendancy of New Criticism after World War I, much of the debate on intentionality addressed whether information external to the text could help determine the writer’s purpose and whether it was even possible or desirable to determine that purpose. Modernist critics, such as T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, and John Crowe Ransom, rejected...