literary criticism

Introduction
Functions
Historical development
- Antiquity
- Medieval period
- The Renaissance
- Neoclassicism and its decline
- Romanticism
- The late 19th century
The 20th century
- The influence of science
- Criticism and knowledge

References & Edit History Related Topics

Images

Portrait of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge

At a Glance

literary criticism summary

Quizzes

Row of colorful books on a bookshelf. Stack of books, pile of books, literature, reading. Homepage 2010, arts and entertainment, history and society

The Literary World

Related Questions

How can literary criticism influence social and political debate?
How can literary critics help neglected works gain new audiences and appreciation?
How did Cultural Materialism differ from American New Historicism in Shakespeare criticism?
How did Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Burke use historical approaches to literature?
How did Edward Said’s Orientalism change the study of literature and colonialism?
How did Ernest Jones apply psychoanalysis to Shakespeare’s Hamlet?
How did Freudian criticism use an author’s writings to explore psychological conflicts?
How did Harold Bloom defend the Western literary tradition in The Western Canon?
How did Harold Bloom explain literary influence in The Anxiety of Influence?
How did I.A. Richards and William Empson contribute to close reading?
How did Jan Kott’s interpretation portray Shakespeare’s plays after World War II?
How did Johann Gottfried Eichhorn contribute to biblical higher criticism?
How did John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks help establish New Criticism in American universities?
How did Lionel Trilling connect literature with political and moral complexity?
How did Marxism influence literary criticism during the 1920s and 1930s?
How did Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida influence American literary theory?
How did Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller promote deconstruction in the United States?
How did Stephen Greenblatt revive historical approaches to Shakespeare and Elizabethan literature?
How did Van Wyck Brooks criticize American culture in America’s Coming-of-Age?
How did Vernon L. Parrington evaluate American literature in Main Currents in American Thought?
How did anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis shape 20th-century literary criticism?
How did cultural studies challenge the separation between high culture and popular culture?
How did feminist critics develop gender-based approaches to literature?
How did moral-aesthetic critics connect literary form with social and moral issues?
How did queer theory examine explicit and implicit portrayals of homosexuality in literature?
How did structuralism and poststructuralism influence literary theory?
How did the scholars of Alexandria preserve and edit ancient Greek literature?
How do literary critics interpret a text’s meaning and judge its quality?
How do literary magazines and scholarly journals publish different kinds of criticism?
How do the expressive and constructive theories of literary composition differ?
How does New Historicism study literature as part of its historical culture?
How does textual criticism help scholars reconstruct damaged ancient works?
How does the proposed Q source relate to the Synoptic Gospels?
How is literary criticism different from literary scholarship?
Which six elements of tragedy did Aristotle identify in Poetics?
Why can literary criticism create conflict between authors and critics?
Why did Longinus’s On the Sublime become important to later critics?
Why did literary criticism sometimes become difficult to distinguish from censorship in Marxist states?
Why did medieval criticism often neglect questions about literary form?
Why do many scholars think Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke?
Why were New Critics criticized for paying too little attention to social context?
What is literature traditionally associated with?
How can literature be classified?

Literature Novels & Short Stories

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External Websites

William and Mary ScholarWorks - Literary Criticism (PDF)
ABC listen - Counterpoint - Literary criticism
International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts - Literary Criticism and Contemporary Critical Theories
Pellissippi State Community College Libraries - Literary Criticism: 1. What is Literary Criticism
Internet Archive - "Literary Criticism"
Humanities LibreTexts - About Literary Criticism

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literary criticism

Written by

Frederick C. Crews

Emeritus Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley. Author of Skeptical Engagements and others.

Frederick C. Crews

Fact-checked by

Britannica Editors

Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....

Britannica Editors

History

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. Plato’s cautions against the risky consequences of poetic inspiration in general in his Republic are thus often taken as the earliest important example of literary criticism. More strictly construed, the term covers only what has been called “practical criticism,” the interpretation of meaning and the judgment of quality....

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