Literary theory is the organized study of literature and the methods used to analyze it. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship has included literary theory along with topics like intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes that help people understand meaning. In modern academia, the humanities use this type of literary scholarship, which comes from post-structuralism. As a result, the term "theory" now covers many scholarly ways of reading texts. These methods are influenced by areas like semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy. These approaches are often found in the Western canon and some postmodernist theories.

History

The study of literary theory became a job in the 20th century, but it has a long history. It began in ancient Greece with Aristotle’s Poetics, in ancient India with Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra, and in ancient Rome with Longinus’s On the Sublime. During the medieval period, scholars in the Middle East and Europe created rules for poetry and speech. Ideas about beauty and art from philosophers in ancient times through the 18th and 19th centuries helped shape modern literary study. Literary theory and criticism are connected to the history of literature itself.

Some scholars call the debates about literary theory in the 1980s and 1990s "the theory wars." A key question during these debates was whether literary theory departments should focus on teaching students to understand and enjoy literature or study culture and ideas using methods like Marxism, feminism, and deconstruction.

Overview

Literary theory begins when a culture considers the purpose of art. A key question in literary theory is "What is literature?" and "How should or do we read it?" Some modern scholars and literary experts believe that "literature" cannot be clearly defined or that it may refer to any use of language. Different theories are identified not only by their methods and conclusions but also by how they interpret meaning in a "text." However, some scholars recognize that these texts do not have a single, fixed meaning considered "correct."

Because literary theorists often use ideas from many different traditions in Continental philosophy and the philosophy of language, grouping their approaches is only an estimate. There are many types of literary theory, each with different ways of analyzing texts. Major schools of theory that have historically been important include historical and biographical criticism, New Criticism, formalism, Russian formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism or historical materialism, feminism and French feminism, post-colonialism, new historicism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, narratology, and psychoanalytic criticism.

Differences among schools

Different ways of understanding literature, such as New Criticism, Marxism, and post-structuralism, often come from different beliefs about what is right or wrong and how society should be organized. For example, New Critics sometimes looked for honesty in poems, even when the poems discussed difficult or religious ideas. A Marxist critic might say that this focus on honesty was more about personal beliefs than about truly analyzing the poem. A post-structuralist critic might avoid discussing the religious meaning of a poem by focusing on how words are used rather than what they mean.

These disagreements are hard to solve because the critics use very different ideas and goals. New Critics base their work on American traditions that mix scholarship and religion. Marxists use ideas from social and economic studies. Post-structuralists use theories from European language studies.

In the late 1950s, Northrop Frye tried to combine older methods of studying literature with New Criticism while also considering ideas from other approaches, such as psychology and history. His book, Anatomy of Criticism, used a structuralist method, meaning it focused on patterns in language and universal structures. This approach was popular for many years but became less common when post-structuralism grew in influence.

Some literary theories, like formalism, believe it is very important to separate "literary" works from other types of writing, such as news articles or scientific reports. Other theories, like post-structuralism, new historicism, deconstruction, and some forms of Marxism and feminism, believe that all writing—whether in books, films, or historical documents—can be studied using similar methods.

Mikhail Bakhtin argued that literary theory struggles to fully understand novels because, unlike other types of writing, novels are still changing and developing.

Another key difference among literary theories is how much they consider the author’s intentions. Before the 20th century, many theories believed the author’s ideas were important for understanding a text. New Criticism, however, said that the author’s intentions should not be considered, and instead, readers should focus only on the text itself. Later theories also agreed that the author’s views are not more important than other interpretations.

Artificial intelligence has created new ways to study literature, as shown in the work of N. Katherine Hayles in Bacteria to AI. Hayles suggests using methods from literary studies to analyze texts created by AI, such as those from ChatGPT. Ethical literary criticism also uses scientific methods to study how literature is created and to examine the effects of AI writing on society.

Schools

Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors:

• Aestheticism – linked to Romanticism, a belief that beauty is the most important part of literature. This includes critics who study beauty in literature and writers like Oscar Wilde, who believed art should be created just for its own beauty, not for any other reason. Key figures: Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Harold Bloom.
• African-American literary theory
• American pragmatism and other American approaches – includes scholars like Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty.
• Cognitive literary theory – uses research from brain science and how the mind works to study literature and culture. Key figures: Frederick Luis Aldama, Mary Thomas Crane, Nancy Easterlin, William Flesch, David Herman, Suzanne Keen, Patrick Colm Hogan, Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, Blakey Vermeule, Lisa Zunshine.
• Cambridge criticism – closely examines texts and how they relate to social issues. Key figures: I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, Q.D. Leavis, William Empson.
• Critical race theory
• Cultural studies – studies how literature affects everyday life. Key figures: Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall (British Cultural Studies); Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; Michel de Certeau; also Paul Gilroy, John Guillory.
• Darwinian literary studies – places literature in the context of evolution and natural selection.
• Deconstruction – a method of close reading that shows how key terms or ideas in a text can be confusing or unclear. Key figures: Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell.
• Descriptive poetics – Key figure: Brian McHale.
• Feminist literary criticism
• Eco-criticism – explores how people and culture connect to the natural world.
• Gender (see feminist literary criticism) – focuses on themes of relationships between genders. Key figures: Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Elaine Showalter.
• Formalism – a type of literary criticism that focuses on the structure and purpose of a text.
• German hermeneutics and philology – Key figures: Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Erich Auerbach, René Wellek.
• Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) – focuses on themes of class conflict. Key figures: Georg Lukács, Valentin Voloshinov, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin.
• Narratology
• New Criticism – analyzes texts based on what is written, not the author’s goals or personal life. Key figures: W. K. Wimsatt, F. R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren.
• New historicism – examines works through their historical context to understand cultural and intellectual history. Key figures: Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, H. Aram Veeser.
• Postcolonialism – focuses on how colonial history influences literature, especially the effects of Western nations exploiting less developed countries and indigenous peoples. Key figures: Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Declan Kiberd.
• Postmodernism – criticizes conditions of the twentieth century, often focusing on social groups viewed as outsiders or the "Other." Key figures: Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Maurice Blanchot.
• Post-structuralism – a term for approaches like deconstruction that challenge structuralism’s goal of creating a rational science of culture. Key figures: Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze.
• Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) – studies the role of the conscious and unconscious mind in literature, including the author, reader, and characters. Key figures: Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Slavoj Žižek, Viktor Tausk.
• Queer theory – examines how gender identity and sexuality are portrayed in literature. Key figures: Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michel Foucault.
• Reader-response criticism – focuses on how readers react to and interpret a text. Key figures: Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall.
• Realist – Key figure: James Wood.
• Russian formalism – Key figures: Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp.
• Structuralism and semiotics (see semiotic literary criticism) – studies universal structures in texts, linguistic units, and how authors convey meaning. Key figures: Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Juri Lotman, Umberto Eco, Jacques Ehrmann, Northrop Frye, and morphology of folklore.
• Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Paul Bénichou, Barbara Johnson.