Literary Criticism

The history of Literary Criticism can be generalized into five categories.  Important works of literature are listed in each historical category:

1. Classical and Medieval Criticism
Plato (c. 428-347 BC):  “Ion”, “Republic”
Aristotle (384-322 BC):  “Poetics”; “Rhetoric”
(Poetics is considered the most important influence upon literary criticism until the late 18th century).
Plotinus (205-270):  “On the Intellectual Beauties”
Bharata Muni (~1st-century BC):  “Natya Shastra”

Horace (65-8 BC): “Art of Poetry”   

(Horace’s famous aphorism from ‘Odes’:  “Carpe diem” (seize the day).
St. Augustine (354-430):  “On Christian Doctrine”
Al-Jahiz (776-869): “al-Bayan wa-‘l-tabyin”
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274):  “The Nature & Domain of Sacred Doctrine”
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321):  “The Banquet”

2. Renaissance Criticism
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586):  “An Apology for Poetry”
Francis Bacon (1561-1626): “The Advancement of Learning”

3. Enlightenment Criticism
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679): “Answer to Davenant’s preface to Gondibert”
John Dryden (1631-1700):  “An Essay of Dramatic Peosy”
John Locke (1632-1704):  “The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry”
Edmund Burke (1729-1797):  “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas to the Sublime and the Beautiful”
(Kant critiqued Burke for not understanding the causes -- "merely gathered data so that some future thinker could explain them").
David Hume (1711-1776):  “Of the Standard of Taste”
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784):  “On Fiction, Rasselas, Preface to Shakespeare”
Denis Diderot (1713-1784):   “The Paradox of Acting”
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804):  “Critique of Judgment”
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797):  “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”

William Blake (1757-1827):  “The Marriage of Heaven or Hell”, “A Vision of the Last Judgment”
Blake had an enormous influence on the beat poets of the 1950s (Allen Ginsberg); the counterculture of the 1960s (Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Van Morrison) and English writer Aldous Huxley.  American country musician and film actor, Kris Kristofferson has stated that he was greatly influenced by the poet William Blake while at Oxford, who had proclaimed that if one has a God-given creative talent then one should use it or else reap sorrow and despair.

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805):  “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”

4. 19th-century Criticism
The British Romantic movement of the early 19th century introduced new aesthetic ideas – the object of literature need not always be beautiful, noble, or perfect.  That literature could elevate a common subject to the level of the sublime.  Arriving later, German Romanticism was notable for valuing humor and wit as well as beauty.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850):  “Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads”
Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854):  "On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834):  "Biographia Literaria"
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860):  "The World as Will and Idea"
Percy Shelley (1792-1822):  "A Defense of Poetry"
Georg Hegel (1770-1831): "The Philosophy of Fine Art"
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873):  "What is Poetry?"
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882):  "The Poet"
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888):  "The Study of Poetry”
(“Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry”).
Emile Zola (1840-1902):  "The Experimental Novel"
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): "The Decay of Lying"

Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898): "The Evolution of Literature"
Mallarme is credited in influencing the theoretical styles of Jacques Derrida (deconstruction) and Jacques Lacan (post-structuralism).  The central premise of deconstruction is that the entire history of Western philosophy and its language and traditions relies on a “metaphysics of presence” – the desire for immediate access to meaning.  Deconstruction is a direct challenge on the concept of time prevalent in all Western thought, dating back to Aristotle's Physics.  It promotes a ‘close’ reading strategy that emphasizes the ambiguity of language over having a logical structure.
In classic Structuralism (early 1900s to late 1950s), “binary opposition” (Truth/Deception, Beauty/Degradation, Goodness/Corruption, Classical/Romantic) was seen as a fundamental organizer of human philosophy, culture, and language.  In general, post-structuralism rejects the methodology of understanding culture based on binary opposition.  According to Derrida, meaning in the West is defined in terms of binary oppositions, “a violent hierarchy” where “one of the two terms governs the other.” (bourgeoisie/working class man, white/black people of colour, men/women; heterosexual/homosexual).  Post-structuralism viewed classic Structuralism as rigid and ahistorical.

Leo Tolstory (1828-1910): “What is Art?”

5. The New Criticism – 20th Century (1900~1970)
From the early 20th century to the late 1960s, American and British literary criticism took a new direction, called ‘The New Criticism”, which came to dominate the study and discussion of literature.  ‘New Criticism’ emphasized the closed reading of text.  In semiotic analysis (the study of meaning making), an open text is a text that allows multiple or mediated interpretation by the readers. A closed text leads the reader to one intended interpretation.  ‘New Criticism’ emphasized form and precise attention to “the words themselves”.
Beginning in the early 1970’s, The New Critics methodology fell out of favor due to the new forces of feminism and structuralism.  Other schools of critical theory followed: post-structuralism, and deconstructionist theory, the New Historicism, and Receptions studies followed.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" 

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913): "Course in General Linguistics" 

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009): "Course in General Linguistics" 

Henri Bergson (1859-1941): "Theory of Art" 

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965): "Tradition and the Individual Talent"; "Hamlet and His Problems" 

Carl Jung (1875-1961): "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" 

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941):  "A Room of One's Own" 

I.A. Richards(1893-1979): "Practical Criticism" 

The concept of 'practical criticism' led in time to the practices of close reading, what is often thought of as the beginning of modern literary criticism. 

John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974):  "Criticism as Pure Speculation" 

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981):  "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience" 

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980): "Why Write?" 

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986):  "The Second Sex" 

Northrop Frye (1912-1991): "Anatomy of Criticism" 

Frye's theory of literary criticism is considered one of the most important works of literary theory published in the 20th century. 

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976): "The Nature of Language", "Language in the Poem" 

Recent scholarship has shown that Heidegger was substantially influenced by St. Augustine of Hippo and that Heidegger's Being and Time would not have been possible without the influence of Augustine's thought. Augustine's Confessions was particularly influential in shaping Heidegger's thought. 

Noam Chomsky (1928- ): "Aspect of the Theory of Syntax” 

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004): "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" 

Michel Foucault (1926-1984): "Truth and Power" 

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975): "The Liberal Imagination" 

Paul de Man (1919-1983): "Semiology and Rhetoric" 

Harold Bloom (1930- ): "The Dialectics of Poetic Tradition" 

Stanley Fish (1938- ): "Normal Circumstances" 

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005): "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination and Feeling" 

Andre Breton (1896-1966): "The Surrealist Manifesto" 

Known as the founder of Surrealism 

Mina Loy (1882-1966): "Feminist Manifesto"