history literature theory

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Literary theory.

“Literary theory” is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools, by which we attempt to understand literature. All literary interpretation draws on a basis in theory but can serve as a justification for very different kinds of critical activity. It is literary theory that formulates the relationship between author and work; literary theory develops the significance of race, class, and gender for literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography of the author and an analysis of their thematic presence within texts. Literary theory offers varying approaches for understanding the role of historical context in interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and unconscious elements of the text. Literary theorists trace the history and evolution of the different genres—narrative, dramatic, lyric—in addition to the more recent emergence of the novel and the short story, while also investigating the importance of formal elements of literary structure. Lastly, literary theory in recent years has sought to explain the degree to which the text is more the product of a culture than an individual author and in turn how those texts help to create the culture.

What Is Literary Theory?
Traditional Literary Criticism
Formalism and New Criticism
Marxism and Critical Theory
Structuralism and Poststructuralism
New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism
Gender Studies and Queer Theory
Cultural Studies
General Works on Theory
Literary and Cultural Theory

1. What Is Literary Theory?

“Literary theory,” sometimes designated “critical theory,” or “theory,” and now undergoing a transformation into “cultural theory” within the discipline of literary studies, can be understood as the set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting literary texts. Literary theory refers to any principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts or from knowledge external to the text that can be applied in multiple interpretive situations. All critical practice regarding literature depends on an underlying structure of ideas in at least two ways: theory provides a rationale for what constitutes the subject matter of criticism—”the literary”—and the specific aims of critical practice—the act of interpretation itself. For example, to speak of the “unity” of Oedipus the King explicitly invokes Aristotle’s theoretical statements on poetics. To argue, as does Chinua Achebe, that Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness fails to grant full humanity to the Africans it depicts is a perspective informed by a postcolonial literary theory that presupposes a history of exploitation and racism. Critics that explain the climactic drowning of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening as a suicide generally call upon a supporting architecture of feminist and gender theory. The structure of ideas that enables criticism of a literary work may or may not be acknowledged by the critic, and the status of literary theory within the academic discipline of literary studies continues to evolve.

Literary theory and the formal practice of literary interpretation runs a parallel but less well known course with the history of philosophy and is evident in the historical record at least as far back as Plato. The Cratylus contains a Plato’s meditation on the relationship of words and the things to which they refer. Plato’s skepticism about signification, i.e., that words bear no etymological relationship to their meanings but are arbitrarily “imposed,” becomes a central concern in the twentieth century to both “Structuralism” and “Poststructuralism.” However, a persistent belief in “reference,” the notion that words and images refer to an objective reality, has provided epistemological (that is, having to do with theories of knowledge) support for theories of literary representation throughout most of Western history. Until the nineteenth century, Art, in Shakespeare’s phrase, held “a mirror up to nature” and faithfully recorded an objectively real world independent of the observer.

Modern literary theory gradually emerges in Europe during the nineteenth century. In one of the earliest developments of literary theory, German “higher criticism” subjected biblical texts to a radical historicizing that broke with traditional scriptural interpretation. “Higher,” or “source criticism,” analyzed biblical tales in light of comparable narratives from other cultures, an approach that anticipated some of the method and spirit of twentieth century theory, particularly “Structuralism” and “New Historicism.” In France, the eminent literary critic Charles Augustin Saint Beuve maintained that a work of literature could be explained entirely in terms of biography, while novelist Marcel Proust devoted his life to refuting Saint Beuve in a massive narrative in which he contended that the details of the life of the artist are utterly transformed in the work of art. (This dispute was taken up anew by the French theorist Roland Barthes in his famous declaration of the “Death of the Author.” See “Structuralism” and “Poststructuralism.”) Perhaps the greatest nineteenth century influence on literary theory came from the deep epistemological suspicion of Friedrich Nietzsche: that facts are not facts until they have been interpreted. Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge has had a profound impact on literary studies and helped usher in an era of intense literary theorizing that has yet to pass.

Attention to the etymology of the term “theory,” from the Greek “theoria,” alerts us to the partial nature of theoretical approaches to literature. “Theoria” indicates a view or perspective of the Greek stage. This is precisely what literary theory offers, though specific theories often claim to present a complete system for understanding literature. The current state of theory is such that there are many overlapping areas of influence, and older schools of theory, though no longer enjoying their previous eminence, continue to exert an influence on the whole. The once widely-held conviction (an implicit theory) that literature is a repository of all that is meaningful and ennobling in the human experience, a view championed by the Leavis School in Britain, may no longer be acknowledged by name but remains an essential justification for the current structure of American universities and liberal arts curricula. The moment of “Deconstruction” may have passed, but its emphasis on the indeterminacy of signs (that we are unable to establish exclusively what a word means when used in a given situation) and thus of texts, remains significant. Many critics may not embrace the label “feminist,” but the premise that gender is a social construct, one of theoretical feminisms distinguishing insights, is now axiomatic in a number of theoretical perspectives.

While literary theory has always implied or directly expressed a conception of the world outside the text, in the twentieth century three movements—”Marxist theory” of the Frankfurt School, “Feminism,” and “Postmodernism”—have opened the field of literary studies into a broader area of inquiry. Marxist approaches to literature require an understanding of the primary economic and social bases of culture since Marxist aesthetic theory sees the work of art as a product, directly or indirectly, of the base structure of society. Feminist thought and practice analyzes the production of literature and literary representation within the framework that includes all social and cultural formations as they pertain to the role of women in history. Postmodern thought consists of both aesthetic and epistemological strands. Postmodernism in art has included a move toward non-referential, non-linear, abstract forms; a heightened degree of self-referentiality; and the collapse of categories and conventions that had traditionally governed art. Postmodern thought has led to the serious questioning of the so-called metanarratives of history, science, philosophy, and economic and sexual reproduction. Under postmodernity, all knowledge comes to be seen as “constructed” within historical self-contained systems of understanding. Marxist, feminist, and postmodern thought have brought about the incorporation of all human discourses (that is, interlocking fields of language and knowledge) as a subject matter for analysis by the literary theorist. Using the various poststructuralist and postmodern theories that often draw on disciplines other than the literary—linguistic, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and philosophical—for their primary insights, literary theory has become an interdisciplinary body of cultural theory. Taking as its premise that human societies and knowledge consist of texts in one form or another, cultural theory (for better or worse) is now applied to the varieties of texts, ambitiously undertaking to become the preeminent model of inquiry into the human condition.

Literary theory is a site of theories: some theories, like “Queer Theory,” are “in;” other literary theories, like “Deconstruction,” are “out” but continue to exert an influence on the field. “Traditional literary criticism,” “New Criticism,” and “Structuralism” are alike in that they held to the view that the study of literature has an objective body of knowledge under its scrutiny. The other schools of literary theory, to varying degrees, embrace a postmodern view of language and reality that calls into serious question the objective referent of literary studies. The following categories are certainly not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive, but they represent the major trends in literary theory of this century.

2. Traditional Literary Criticism

Academic literary criticism prior to the rise of “New Criticism” in the United States tended to practice traditional literary history: tracking influence, establishing the canon of major writers in the literary periods, and clarifying historical context and allusions within the text. Literary biography was and still is an important interpretive method in and out of the academy; versions of moral criticism, not unlike the Leavis School in Britain, and aesthetic (e.g. genre studies) criticism were also generally influential literary practices. Perhaps the key unifying feature of traditional literary criticism was the consensus within the academy as to the both the literary canon (that is, the books all educated persons should read) and the aims and purposes of literature. What literature was, and why we read literature, and what we read, were questions that subsequent movements in literary theory were to raise.

3. Formalism and New Criticism

“Formalism” is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that emphasizes literary form and the study of literary devices within the text. The work of the Formalists had a general impact on later developments in “Structuralism” and other theories of narrative. “Formalism,” like “Structuralism,” sought to place the study of literature on a scientific basis through objective analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques, and other “functions” that comprise the literary work. The Formalists placed great importance on the literariness of texts, those qualities that distinguished the literary from other kinds of writing. Neither author nor context was essential for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the “hero-function,” for example, that had meaning. Form was the content. A plot device or narrative strategy was examined for how it functioned and compared to how it had functioned in other literary works. Of the Russian Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky are probably the most well known.

The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was “to make the stones stonier” nicely expresses their notion of literariness. “Formalism” is perhaps best known is Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization.” The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky contended, rendered invisible the uniqueness and particularity of the objects of existence. Literary language, partly by calling attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar and made fresh the experience of daily life.

The “New Criticism,” so designated as to indicate a break with traditional methods, was a product of the American university in the 1930s and 40s. “New Criticism” stressed close reading of the text itself, much like the French pedagogical precept “explication du texte.” As a strategy of reading, “New Criticism” viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object independent of historical context and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility of the artist. T.S. Eliot, though not explicitly associated with the movement, expressed a similar critical-aesthetic philosophy in his essays on John Donne and the metaphysical poets, writers who Eliot believed experienced a complete integration of thought and feeling. New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and W.K. Wimsatt placed a similar focus on the metaphysical poets and poetry in general, a genre well suited to New Critical practice. “New Criticism” aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigor to literary studies, confining itself to careful scrutiny of the text alone and the formal structures of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, among others. “New Criticism” was fired by the conviction that their readings of poetry would yield a humanizing influence on readers and thus counter the alienating tendencies of modern, industrial life. “New Criticism” in this regard bears an affinity to the Southern Agrarian movement whose manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand , contained essays by two New Critics, Ransom and Warren. Perhaps the enduring legacy of “New Criticism” can be found in the college classroom, in which the verbal texture of the poem on the page remains a primary object of literary study.

4. Marxism and Critical Theory

Marxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class conflict as well as the reinforcement of class distinctions through the medium of literature. Marxist theorists use traditional techniques of literary analysis but subordinate aesthetic concerns to the final social and political meanings of literature. Marxist theorist often champion authors sympathetic to the working classes and authors whose work challenges economic equalities found in capitalist societies. In keeping with the totalizing spirit of Marxism, literary theories arising from the Marxist paradigm have not only sought new ways of understanding the relationship between economic production and literature, but all cultural production as well. Marxist analyses of society and history have had a profound effect on literary theory and practical criticism, most notably in the development of “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism.”

The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs contributed to an understanding of the relationship between historical materialism and literary form, in particular with realism and the historical novel. Walter Benjamin broke new ground in his work in his study of aesthetics and the reproduction of the work of art. The Frankfurt School of philosophers, including most notably Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—after their emigration to the United States—played a key role in introducing Marxist assessments of culture into the mainstream of American academic life. These thinkers became associated with what is known as “Critical theory,” one of the constituent components of which was a critique of the instrumental use of reason in advanced capitalist culture. “Critical theory” held to a distinction between the high cultural heritage of Europe and the mass culture produced by capitalist societies as an instrument of domination. “Critical theory” sees in the structure of mass cultural forms—jazz, Hollywood film, advertising—a replication of the structure of the factory and the workplace. Creativity and cultural production in advanced capitalist societies were always already co-opted by the entertainment needs of an economic system that requires sensory stimulation and recognizable cliché and suppressed the tendency for sustained deliberation.

The major Marxist influences on literary theory since the Frankfurt School have been Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton in Great Britain and Frank Lentricchia and Fredric Jameson in the United States. Williams is associated with the New Left political movement in Great Britain and the development of “Cultural Materialism” and the Cultural Studies Movement, originating in the 1960s at Birmingham University’s Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Eagleton is known both as a Marxist theorist and as a popularizer of theory by means of his widely read overview, Literary Theory . Lentricchia likewise became influential through his account of trends in theory, After the New Criticism . Jameson is a more diverse theorist, known both for his impact on Marxist theories of culture and for his position as one of the leading figures in theoretical postmodernism. Jameson’s work on consumer culture, architecture, film, literature and other areas, typifies the collapse of disciplinary boundaries taking place in the realm of Marxist and postmodern cultural theory. Jameson’s work investigates the way the structural features of late capitalism—particularly the transformation of all culture into commodity form—are now deeply embedded in all of our ways of communicating.

5. Structuralism and Poststructuralism

Like the “New Criticism,” “Structuralism” sought to bring to literary studies a set of objective criteria for analysis and a new intellectual rigor. “Structuralism” can be viewed as an extension of “Formalism” in that that both “Structuralism” and “Formalism” devoted their attention to matters of literary form (i.e. structure) rather than social or historical content; and that both bodies of thought were intended to put the study of literature on a scientific, objective basis. “Structuralism” relied initially on the ideas of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Like Plato, Saussure regarded the signifier (words, marks, symbols) as arbitrary and unrelated to the concept, the signified, to which it referred. Within the way a particular society uses language and signs, meaning was constituted by a system of “differences” between units of the language. Particular meanings were of less interest than the underlying structures of signification that made meaning itself possible, often expressed as an emphasis on “langue” rather than “parole.” “Structuralism” was to be a metalanguage, a language about languages, used to decode actual languages, or systems of signification. The work of the “Formalist” Roman Jakobson contributed to “Structuralist” thought, and the more prominent Structuralists included Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Tzvetan Todorov, A.J. Greimas, Gerard Genette, and Barthes.

The philosopher Roland Barthes proved to be a key figure on the divide between “Structuralism” and “Poststructuralism.” “Poststructuralism” is less unified as a theoretical movement than its precursor; indeed, the work of its advocates known by the term “Deconstruction” calls into question the possibility of the coherence of discourse, or the capacity for language to communicate. “Deconstruction,” Semiotic theory (a study of signs with close connections to “Structuralism,” “Reader response theory” in America (“Reception theory” in Europe), and “Gender theory” informed by the psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva are areas of inquiry that can be located under the banner of “Poststructuralism.” If signifier and signified are both cultural concepts, as they are in “Poststructuralism,” reference to an empirically certifiable reality is no longer guaranteed by language. “Deconstruction” argues that this loss of reference causes an endless deferral of meaning, a system of differences between units of language that has no resting place or final signifier that would enable the other signifiers to hold their meaning. The most important theorist of “Deconstruction,” Jacques Derrida, has asserted, “There is no getting outside text,” indicating a kind of free play of signification in which no fixed, stable meaning is possible. “Poststructuralism” in America was originally identified with a group of Yale academics, the Yale School of “Deconstruction:” J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann, and Paul de Man. Other tendencies in the moment after “Deconstruction” that share some of the intellectual tendencies of “Poststructuralism” would included the “Reader response” theories of Stanley Fish, Jane Tompkins, and Wolfgang Iser.

Lacanian psychoanalysis, an updating of the work of Sigmund Freud, extends “Postructuralism” to the human subject with further consequences for literary theory. According to Lacan, the fixed, stable self is a Romantic fiction; like the text in “Deconstruction,” the self is a decentered mass of traces left by our encounter with signs, visual symbols, language, etc. For Lacan, the self is constituted by language, a language that is never one’s own, always another’s, always already in use. Barthes applies these currents of thought in his famous declaration of the “death” of the Author: “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” while also applying a similar “Poststructuralist” view to the Reader: “the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.”

Michel Foucault is another philosopher, like Barthes, whose ideas inform much of poststructuralist literary theory. Foucault played a critical role in the development of the postmodern perspective that knowledge is constructed in concrete historical situations in the form of discourse; knowledge is not communicated by discourse but is discourse itself, can only be encountered textually. Following Nietzsche, Foucault performs what he calls “genealogies,” attempts at deconstructing the unacknowledged operation of power and knowledge to reveal the ideologies that make domination of one group by another seem “natural.” Foucaldian investigations of discourse and power were to provide much of the intellectual impetus for a new way of looking at history and doing textual studies that came to be known as the “New Historicism.”

6. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

“New Historicism,” a term coined by Stephen Greenblatt, designates a body of theoretical and interpretive practices that began largely with the study of early modern literature in the United States. “New Historicism” in America had been somewhat anticipated by the theorists of “Cultural Materialism” in Britain, which, in the words of their leading advocate, Raymond Williams describes “the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production.” Both “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism” seek to understand literary texts historically and reject the formalizing influence of previous literary studies, including “New Criticism,” “Structuralism” and “Deconstruction,” all of which in varying ways privilege the literary text and place only secondary emphasis on historical and social context. According to “New Historicism,” the circulation of literary and non-literary texts produces relations of social power within a culture. New Historicist thought differs from traditional historicism in literary studies in several crucial ways. Rejecting traditional historicism’s premise of neutral inquiry, “New Historicism” accepts the necessity of making historical value judgments. According to “New Historicism,” we can only know the textual history of the past because it is “embedded,” a key term, in the textuality of the present and its concerns. Text and context are less clearly distinct in New Historicist practice. Traditional separations of literary and non-literary texts, “great” literature and popular literature, are also fundamentally challenged. For the “New Historicist,” all acts of expression are embedded in the material conditions of a culture. Texts are examined with an eye for how they reveal the economic and social realities, especially as they produce ideology and represent power or subversion. Like much of the emergent European social history of the 1980s, “New Historicism” takes particular interest in representations of marginal/marginalized groups and non-normative behaviors—witchcraft, cross-dressing, peasant revolts, and exorcisms—as exemplary of the need for power to represent subversive alternatives, the Other, to legitimize itself.

Louis Montrose, another major innovator and exponent of “New Historicism,” describes a fundamental axiom of the movement as an intellectual belief in “the textuality of history and the historicity of texts.” “New Historicism” draws on the work of Levi-Strauss, in particular his notion of culture as a “self-regulating system.” The Foucaldian premise that power is ubiquitous and cannot be equated with state or economic power and Gramsci’s conception of “hegemony,” i.e., that domination is often achieved through culturally-orchestrated consent rather than force, are critical underpinnings to the “New Historicist” perspective. The translation of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on carnival coincided with the rise of the “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism” and left a legacy in work of other theorists of influence like Peter Stallybrass and Jonathan Dollimore. In its period of ascendancy during the 1980s, “New Historicism” drew criticism from the political left for its depiction of counter-cultural expression as always co-opted by the dominant discourses. Equally, “New Historicism’s” lack of emphasis on “literariness” and formal literary concerns brought disdain from traditional literary scholars. However, “New Historicism” continues to exercise a major influence in the humanities and in the extended conception of literary studies.

7. Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism

“Ethnic Studies,” sometimes referred to as “Minority Studies,” has an obvious historical relationship with “Postcolonial Criticism” in that Euro-American imperialism and colonization in the last four centuries, whether external (empire) or internal (slavery) has been directed at recognizable ethnic groups: African and African-American, Chinese, the subaltern peoples of India, Irish, Latino, Native American, and Philipino, among others. “Ethnic Studies” concerns itself generally with art and literature produced by identifiable ethnic groups either marginalized or in a subordinate position to a dominant culture. “Postcolonial Criticism” investigates the relationships between colonizers and colonized in the period post-colonization. Though the two fields are increasingly finding points of intersection—the work of bell hooks, for example—and are both activist intellectual enterprises, “Ethnic Studies and “Postcolonial Criticism” have significant differences in their history and ideas.

“Ethnic Studies” has had a considerable impact on literary studies in the United States and Britain. In W.E.B. Dubois, we find an early attempt to theorize the position of African-Americans within dominant white culture through his concept of “double consciousness,” a dual identity including both “American” and “Negro.” Dubois and theorists after him seek an understanding of how that double experience both creates identity and reveals itself in culture. Afro-Caribbean and African writers—Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe—have made significant early contributions to the theory and practice of ethnic criticism that explores the traditions, sometimes suppressed or underground, of ethnic literary activity while providing a critique of representations of ethnic identity as found within the majority culture. Ethnic and minority literary theory emphasizes the relationship of cultural identity to individual identity in historical circumstances of overt racial oppression. More recently, scholars and writers such as Henry Louis Gates, Toni Morrison, and Kwame Anthony Appiah have brought attention to the problems inherent in applying theoretical models derived from Euro-centric paradigms (that is, structures of thought) to minority works of literature while at the same time exploring new interpretive strategies for understanding the vernacular (common speech) traditions of racial groups that have been historically marginalized by dominant cultures.

Though not the first writer to explore the historical condition of postcolonialism, the Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said’s book Orientalism is generally regarded as having inaugurated the field of explicitly “Postcolonial Criticism” in the West. Said argues that the concept of “the Orient” was produced by the “imaginative geography” of Western scholarship and has been instrumental in the colonization and domination of non-Western societies. “Postcolonial” theory reverses the historical center/margin direction of cultural inquiry: critiques of the metropolis and capital now emanate from the former colonies. Moreover, theorists like Homi K. Bhabha have questioned the binary thought that produces the dichotomies—center/margin, white/black, and colonizer/colonized—by which colonial practices are justified. The work of Gayatri C. Spivak has focused attention on the question of who speaks for the colonial “Other” and the relation of the ownership of discourse and representation to the development of the postcolonial subjectivity. Like feminist and ethnic theory, “Postcolonial Criticism” pursues not merely the inclusion of the marginalized literature of colonial peoples into the dominant canon and discourse. “Postcolonial Criticism” offers a fundamental critique of the ideology of colonial domination and at the same time seeks to undo the “imaginative geography” of Orientalist thought that produced conceptual as well as economic divides between West and East, civilized and uncivilized, First and Third Worlds. In this respect, “Postcolonial Criticism” is activist and adversarial in its basic aims. Postcolonial theory has brought fresh perspectives to the role of colonial peoples—their wealth, labor, and culture—in the development of modern European nation states. While “Postcolonial Criticism” emerged in the historical moment following the collapse of the modern colonial empires, the increasing globalization of culture, including the neo-colonialism of multinational capitalism, suggests a continued relevance for this field of inquiry.

8. Gender Studies and Queer Theory

Gender theory came to the forefront of the theoretical scene first as feminist theory but has subsequently come to include the investigation of all gender and sexual categories and identities. Feminist gender theory followed slightly behind the reemergence of political feminism in the United States and Western Europe during the 1960s. Political feminism of the so-called “second wave” had as its emphasis practical concerns with the rights of women in contemporary societies, women’s identity, and the representation of women in media and culture. These causes converged with early literary feminist practice, characterized by Elaine Showalter as “gynocriticism,” which emphasized the study and canonical inclusion of works by female authors as well as the depiction of women in male-authored canonical texts.

Feminist gender theory is postmodern in that it challenges the paradigms and intellectual premises of western thought, but also takes an activist stance by proposing frequent interventions and alternative epistemological positions meant to change the social order. In the context of postmodernism, gender theorists, led by the work of Judith Butler, initially viewed the category of “gender” as a human construct enacted by a vast repetition of social performance. The biological distinction between man and woman eventually came under the same scrutiny by theorists who reached a similar conclusion: the sexual categories are products of culture and as such help create social reality rather than simply reflect it. Gender theory achieved a wide readership and acquired much its initial theoretical rigor through the work of a group of French feminist theorists that included Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, who while Bulgarian rather than French, made her mark writing in French. French feminist thought is based on the assumption that the Western philosophical tradition represses the experience of women in the structure of its ideas. As an important consequence of this systematic intellectual repression and exclusion, women’s lives and bodies in historical societies are subject to repression as well. In the creative/critical work of Cixous, we find the history of Western thought depicted as binary oppositions: “speech/writing; Nature/Art, Nature/History, Nature/Mind, Passion/Action.” For Cixous, and for Irigaray as well, these binaries are less a function of any objective reality they describe than the male-dominated discourse of the Western tradition that produced them. Their work beyond the descriptive stage becomes an intervention in the history of theoretical discourse, an attempt to alter the existing categories and systems of thought that found Western rationality. French feminism, and perhaps all feminism after Beauvoir, has been in conversation with the psychoanalytic revision of Freud in the work of Jacques Lacan. Kristeva’s work draws heavily on Lacan. Two concepts from Kristeva—the “semiotic” and “abjection”—have had a significant influence on literary theory. Kristeva’s “semiotic” refers to the gaps, silences, spaces, and bodily presence within the language/symbol system of a culture in which there might be a space for a women’s language, different in kind as it would be from male-dominated discourse.

Masculine gender theory as a separate enterprise has focused largely on social, literary, and historical accounts of the construction of male gender identities. Such work generally lacks feminisms’ activist stance and tends to serve primarily as an indictment rather than a validation of male gender practices and masculinity. The so-called “Men’s Movement,” inspired by the work of Robert Bly among others, was more practical than theoretical and has had only limited impact on gender discourse. The impetus for the “Men’s Movement” came largely as a response to the critique of masculinity and male domination that runs throughout feminism and the upheaval of the 1960s, a period of crisis in American social ideology that has required a reconsideration of gender roles. Having long served as the de facto “subject” of Western thought, male identity and masculine gender theory awaits serious investigation as a particular, and no longer universally representative, field of inquiry.

Much of what theoretical energy of masculine gender theory currently possesses comes from its ambiguous relationship with the field of “Queer theory.” “Queer theory” is not synonymous with gender theory, nor even with the overlapping fields of gay and lesbian studies, but does share many of their concerns with normative definitions of man, woman, and sexuality. “Queer theory” questions the fixed categories of sexual identity and the cognitive paradigms generated by normative (that is, what is considered “normal”) sexual ideology. To “queer” becomes an act by which stable boundaries of sexual identity are transgressed, reversed, mimicked, or otherwise critiqued. “Queering” can be enacted on behalf of all non-normative sexualities and identities as well, all that is considered by the dominant paradigms of culture to be alien, strange, unfamiliar, transgressive, odd—in short, queer. Michel Foucault’s work on sexuality anticipates and informs the Queer theoretical movement in a role similar to the way his writing on power and discourse prepared the ground for “New Historicism.” Judith Butler contends that heterosexual identity long held to be a normative ground of sexuality is actually produced by the suppression of homoerotic possibility. Eve Sedgwick is another pioneering theorist of “Queer theory,” and like Butler, Sedgwick maintains that the dominance of heterosexual culture conceals the extensive presence of homosocial relations. For Sedgwick, the standard histories of western societies are presented in exclusively in terms of heterosexual identity: “Inheritance, Marriage, Dynasty, Family, Domesticity, Population,” and thus conceiving of homosexual identity within this framework is already problematic.

9. Cultural Studies

Much of the intellectual legacy of “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism” can now be felt in the “Cultural Studies” movement in departments of literature, a movement not identifiable in terms of a single theoretical school, but one that embraces a wide array of perspectives—media studies, social criticism, anthropology, and literary theory—as they apply to the general study of culture. “Cultural Studies” arose quite self-consciously in the 80s to provide a means of analysis of the rapidly expanding global culture industry that includes entertainment, advertising, publishing, television, film, computers and the Internet. “Cultural Studies” brings scrutiny not only to these varied categories of culture, and not only to the decreasing margins of difference between these realms of expression, but just as importantly to the politics and ideology that make contemporary culture possible. “Cultural Studies” became notorious in the 90s for its emphasis on pop music icons and music video in place of canonical literature, and extends the ideas of the Frankfurt School on the transition from a truly popular culture to mass culture in late capitalist societies, emphasizing the significance of the patterns of consumption of cultural artifacts. “Cultural Studies” has been interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary, from its inception; indeed, “Cultural Studies” can be understood as a set of sometimes conflicting methods and approaches applied to a questioning of current cultural categories. Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris, Tony Bennett and Simon During are some of the important advocates of a “Cultural Studies” that seeks to displace the traditional model of literary studies.

10. References and Further Reading

A. general works on theory.

Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
During, Simon. Ed. The Cultural Studies Reader . London: Routledge, 1999.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Stanton, Gareth, and Maley, Willy. Eds. Postcolonial Criticism . New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 1997.
Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia. Eds. Modern Literary Theory: A Reader . 4 th edition.
Richter, David H. Ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends . 2 nd Ed. Bedford Books: Boston, 1998.
Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology . Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998.

b. Literary and Cultural Theory

Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture . Ed. J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 2001.
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy: And Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans.
Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text . Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
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Literature, Theory, History

Jonathan Hart

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Table of contents (12 chapters)

Front matter, introduction, comparative literature, comparing empires, literature and culture, otherness and authority, historicism, feminism, and the poetics of difference, poetics and poetic worlds, literature, theory, and after, between history and poetry, translating las casas, comparison, conquest, and globalization, back matter.

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"With respect for the 'messiness' of the text - another name for its irreducibility to other purposes - Hart considers the migratory history of literary studies in our time. His praise of comparison as a way of seeing lifts the discussion out of interdepartmental debates, and his history of the worldwide career of Las Casas demonstrates the unpredictable force of texts engaging with otherness." - Haun Saussy, University of Chicago and author of The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic and Great Walls of Discourse

"Hart (English and comparative literature, Univ. of Alberta, Canada) gives a history of comparative literary theory as affected by post-colonialism and globalization. He discusses the theory of the literature of conquest and the history of criticism as it examines race and "othering." He considers the key to his book to be "poetics and rhetoric, representation and the art of persuasion" and examines poetry in detail because of the coding the poetic voice uses and that voice's indirect relationship with the reader. Hart insists that interpretation is as old as Plato. Many (David Lodge comes to mind) would argue that criticism exists to support certain incestuous circles (English literature departments arguing for their own existence). However, Hart sees theory as a way of understanding poetry, theater, and literature. He asks for close reading and an understanding of the ways global literature speaks to other work and across cultures; he looks for reading and understanding to work in the context in which the work was written. In other words, he argues that before criticizing a writer or a work of literature, the reader must know history. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty" - Choice

Book Title : Literature, Theory, History

Authors : Jonathan Hart

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339583

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan New York

eBook Packages : Palgrave Literature Collection , Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Hardcover ISBN : 978-0-230-11339-8 Published: 05 October 2011

Softcover ISBN : 978-1-349-29522-7 Published: 05 October 2011

eBook ISBN : 978-0-230-33958-3 Published: 24 October 2011

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XII, 265

Topics : Literary Theory , Performing Arts , Cultural Theory

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A History of Literary Theory and Criticism from Plato to the Present

Leon golden , florida state university. [email protected].

In this work Professor Habib embarks on an ambitious and rewarding task. To understand the thorough and complex kind of literary history which Habib has written we should note the five goals which he explicitly says have motivated the shaping of his study. First comes the recognition that literary theory is not a discrete entity but is embedded in one or more philosophical traditions that require some exposition and clarification for students and general readers if they are to grasp the depth and significance of that theory; secondly while the text is impressively comprehensive it does not in its 838 pages attempt to cover every important figure. It does select influential theorists, movements, and critics for focused attention and close reading, and together with this close analysis of selected texts Habib provides an account of the historical background, political, social, intellectual in which these works were written. A third feature of the book is that while it recognizes and indicates the influence of prior philosophical and critical theories on later ones, it is organized so that the reader can access information about particular theories without first reviewing their antecedents. A fourth principal followed by Habib is to challenge a currently popular assumption that modern manifestations of literary theory have bypassed or even erased the importance of earlier important contributions to the subject. Habib emphasizes the continuity of influence of past great philosophical orientations as well as the continuing relevance of those positions. Finally there is an aspiration on Habib’s part to break through the barrier of unnecessarily obscure jargon in which some critical theories are framed so as to make those theories more readily accessible to students and general readers. In the program he has defined for himself, Habib has achieved considerable success although not perfection.

Habib divides his historical study of movements in literary theory and criticism into eight parts beginning with Classical Literary Criticism. In his introductory essay on this subject Habib provides a succinct assessment of the impressive achievement of the classical world in generating the foundations of a rich tradition of literary theory which in various transformations remains influential today. He writes:

During this span of almost a thousand years, poets, philosophers, rhetoricians, grammarians, and critics laid down many of the basic terms, concepts, and questions that were to shape the future of literary criticism as it evolved all the way through to our own century. These include the concept of “mimesis” or imitation; the concept of beauty and its connection with truth and goodness; the idea of the organic unity of a literary work; the social, political and moral functions of a work of literature; the connection between literature, philosophy, and rhetoric; the nature and status of language; the impact of literary performance on an audience; the definition of figures of speech such as metaphor, metonymy, and symbol; the notion of a “canon” of the most important literary works; and the development of various genres such as epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, and song. (p. 10)

During this prolific period two philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, dominated the field of literary theory advocating strongly contradictory interpretative positions. Plato judged literature and all other forms of artistic mimesis from the vantage point of a moral philosopher who condemned a world view found in Homer, the greatest of all Greek poets, and in much of Greek tragedy, especially the work of Euripides. In these works the representation of amoral human and divine behavior abounds and leads Plato to assert the need to impose upon them the strictest censorship because of their dangerous capacity to corrupt the moral fiber of society.

In book X [of the Republic ] Plato will allege that poetry establishes “a vicious constitution” in the soul, setting up emotions as rulers in place of reason (X, 605b-c, 606d). Hence in the earlier book, Plato advocates an open and strict censorship of poetry, introducing certain charges hitherto unelaborated: (1) the falsity of its claims and representations regarding both gods and men; (2) its corruptive effect on character; and (3) its “disorderly” complexity and encouragement of individualism in the sphere of sensibility and feeling. (p. 28)

Habib demonstrates Plato’s role as a philosopher and literary critic through a close reading of his most influential work on this subject, the Republic , but he also notes a much less hostile treatment of poetry as a form of “divine inspiration” in the Ion . He recognizes the considerable influence of Plato throughout the history of philosophy and aesthetics and extending into our own day with special reference to the following areas: “the doctrine of imitation; the educational and didactic functions of poetry; the place of poetry in the political state and the question of censorship; the treatment of poetry as a species of rhetoric; the nature of poetic inspiration; and the opposition of poetry to various other disciplines and dispositions such as philosophy, science, reason, and mechanism.” About these significant interactions he declares “We are still grappling with the problems laid down by Plato.

To Aristotle’s great achievement as a literary theorist and critic, and to his treatise on the Poetics where his genius in this field is principally to be found, Habib pays the following high compliment: “The Poetics is usually recognized as the most influential treatise in the history of literary criticism.” Habib provides a comprehensive survey of the principal concepts in the Poetics which are mainly concerned with tragedy but are applicable in greater or lesser measure to other genres as well. This close reading of the Poetics will be very helpful to readers but it is not without points that need to be refined. Most important among these is Habib’s treatment of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy and its key and enigmatic concept of katharsis . Habib translates the relevant passage as follows: “Tragedy…represents men in action and does not use narrative, and through pity and fear it effects relief (italics mine) to these and similar emotions.” By choosing to translate katharsis as “relief,” one of its traditional interpretations and one that has a long and influential history behind it, he fails to communicate to his readers that this interpretation of the term has undergone serious challenge over time and remains controversial today. It would have been much more valuable for Habib to explain that differences in the interpretation of the term have been related by scholars to different Aristotelian texts. Support for the interpretation that Habib follows is found at Politics 1341b36-1342a16, where Aristotle describes a process of homeopathic medical purgation that takes place when individuals possessed by some form of psychological frenzy are cured of that frenzy when confronted by musical melodies that are expressive of such frenzy. The action described here of frenzied musical melodies homeopathically “purging” a frenzied psychological state can be transferred in the view of a number of scholars to the experience of tragedy, where pity and fear emerging from the page or stage homeopathically purge and thus relieve the oppressive pity and fear assumed always to reside unhealthily in the psyche of the audience.

A different theory, which we may call the “purification” theory of katharsis is based on Nicomachean Ethics 1106b16-23. In this passage Aristotle says that in feelings and actions, and he specifically mentions pity here, “there exists the possibility of excess, deficiency, and the proper mean.” He asserts that our goal should be to experience such emotions in accordance with the mean and in avoidance of excess and deficiency The great German dramatist and critic Lessing, in reference to this passage, argued that katharsis should represent a form of moral purification, but Habib also cites the contrary view of Oscar Wilde that this Aristotelian concept represents an aesthetic purification rather than a moral one. A problem with the “purification” interpretation is that while it can make use of the purgation theory to explain the removal of excess it does not offer a mechanism for correcting deficiency (unless it should make use of the cognitive theory of katharsis discussed next). Some scholars have argued that purgation and moral purification can take place simultaneously.

A third interpretation of katharsis that has entered into the discussion in recent decades asserts that the term should be understood as a cognitive act leading to an understanding of the cause, meaning, and effect of pity and fear. The central text in support of this view is Poetics 1448b4-17 where Aristotle asserts that human beings are the most imitative of all animals, learn their first lessons through imitation, and take cognitive pleasure in viewing even circumstances that would be extremely painful in real life. The reason for this he tells us is that all human beings take pleasure in learning and that is why we enjoy artistic representations because we “learn and make inferences from them.”

Since katharsis continues to be a concept which fascinates students of literature and is frequently used in various contexts there would be real value in outlining the grounds influencing the interpretative history of the term into our present era. Since it is an important critical term, our understanding of it would profit from the continuing introspection of all readers as to what actually transpires within them when they experience literature. One technical note may be added. Habib has chosen to use the transliteration, katharsis, of the Greek word in his discussion and index. Many readers who will come to this work for guidance will have encountered the word in its more common English spelling, “catharsis.” There is no cross referencing in the index of the two variant spellings and so it is likely that there will be readers who will not be successful in finding in the text what they are looking for.

Habib also discusses Plato’s antagonistic view toward rhetoric and Aristotle’s much more favorable treatment of the subject and then traces the history of rhetoric in the ancient world through the Hellenistic and Roman periods. He provides an informative survey of the influence of classical rhetoric on modern literary theory before devoting chapters to later Greek and Latin criticism (Horace and Longinus) and Neo-Platonism. This is followed by an impressively thorough review of literary criticism in the Middle Ages which leads us to the beginning of the Modern Period.

In the early modern period Habib gives special emphasis to Sir Philip Sydney, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope. When we come to that phase of the modern period which we call the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, a period lasting from about 1680 to the end of the 18th century, we encounter powerful intellectual forces that have influenced many aspects of modern thought including the broad field of aesthetics. Habib provides an excellent introduction to this period in his survey of the historical and intellectual background behind the revolutionary ideas that were promulgated during this time and especially in regard to the ideas and influence of Locke, Hume, and Vico. It was toward the end the Enlightenment period that Immanuel Kant, the first of the two truly great modern philosophers, comparable to Plato and Aristotle in the western intellectual tradition, appeared on the scene.

The Kantian philosophical system is highly complex and presents a challenge to the understanding of a reader who does not have a significant background in philosophy. Habib, however, does not shy away from his stated purpose of making the general issues of aesthetics and criticism embedded in a philosopher’s overall system as available as possible to anyone interested in the history of literary theory and criticism. Habib’s essay on “The Kantian System and Kant’s Aesthetics” is a disciplined effort to take the reader through the challenging complexities of the Kantian system by patiently clarifying arguments and explaining terminology. In apprehending Kant’s aesthetic theories the reader will be involved in abstract philosophical arguments and concepts that differ from much of the critical theory that has been encountered previously. Habib completes his discussion of Kant with a review of the widespread and powerful influence of this philosopher’s ideas in many different fields. In particular, Kant exerted a profound influence on Hegel whose own work was as multifaceted and complex as the older philosopher. Hegel’s impact on philosophers and aestheticians who came after him was immense and, as in the case of Kant, Habib gives a careful, detailed account of Hegel’s complex philosophical system and its influence.

After lengthy discussions of Kant and Hegel, Habib devotes chapters to the discussion of Romanticism on the European continent and in England and America, Realism and Naturalism, Symbolism and Aestheticism, a group he calls “The Heterological Thinkers” that includes Schopenhauer, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Arnold who generally elevated the claims of emotion over the force of reason. He completes his survey of influential nineteenth century thinkers with a discussion of the world view of Karl Marx, and the literary critics and aestheticians who made use of his theories.

Habib completes his historical survey with a succinct review of the major events of twentieth-century history that serve as a background to the intellectual developments of that century. This was a period of disasters such as World War I, the Great Depression, the Holocaust and other genocides, but also the era when a concerted, allied effort in World War II defeated tyranny in Europe and Asia, impressive scientific advances took place, and a rich cultural and literary life flourished in the decades after the war. Later in the post-war period political dissension arose over the Vietnam war and the struggle for civil rights became an important defining theme in the history of the period. Habib points out that it was against this background that recent schools of literary theory arose and developed. As with his discussions of Kant and Hegel he discusses all of these from psychoanalytical criticism through New Historicism carefully and in depth. Habib completes his historical survey with an Epilogue that records the limitations that have been uncovered in the most influential modern literary theories and which have led to the development of newer critical positions that are more localized in scope and theme. Finally he adds a Selected Bibliography for each of the chapters of the book.

As a history of literary theory and criticism this work covers the field exceptionally well and should be commended in addition for placing intellectual and cultural history within the context of political and social history. Habib is eloquent in urging the application of the techniques of literary theory and criticism to a variety of extraliterary texts but could have done much more about relating theory to literature itself, something that he does do extremely well in his discussion of Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy . Here are two examples of many possible themes that would have enriched our understanding of the necessarily symbiotic relationship between critical theory and the literary work. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey appeared on the scene in western civilization nearly 3000 years ago and they are still doing just fine at the box offices (book stores) of the world today. Why? Survivability and endurance of literary texts (just as in the case of philosophical systems) are factors of very great importance in our judgment of their quality and value. Tracing this phenomenon through the vicissitudes of history and social change, often cataclysmic, in which Habib carefully frames the history and evolution of critical theory, would be a fascinating and enlightening investigation. Here Habib would have had an inviting opportunity to provide a concrete example of the clashing viewpoints of the new historicist versus liberal humanist approaches to the interpretation of Shakespeare, a theme that he discusses with clarity on the theoretical level. The phenomenon of tragedy is another question that might be profitably considered. The genre emerged as a significant presence in the literary tradition of western civilization only a couple of centuries after Homer and has been with us ever since. What is the reason for its endurance as a genre? Of the numerous explanations and definitions of tragedy that have been offered, can one be cited as authoritative? Does tragedy represent some essential universal element of the human condition or does it undergo transformation and evolution in response to the changing currents of historical and social circumstances? Is there a way of resolving, is it possible to resolve, or is it worth resolving the differences in the conflicting theoretical views about tragedy (e.g. those of Aristotle, Hegel, Arthur Miller and others)?

All in all Habib’s survey of literary theory and criticism is serious, ambitious, informative and intellectually challenging. Readers who are serious, ambitious, eager to learn material that is not always easily accessible, and open to intellectual challenge will be those who will profit most from it.

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Brewton, V. (n.d.). Literary Theory . Internet encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved February 14, 2023, from https://iep.utm.edu/literary/#H2

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Feminist literary criticism (also known as feminist criticism) is the literary analysis that arises from the viewpoint of feminism, feminist theory, and/or feminist politics.

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Historical criticism is the historical approach to literary criticism. It involves looking beyond the literature at the broader historical and cultural events occurring during the time the piece was written. An understanding of the world the author lived in (events, ideologies, culture, lifestyle etc.) allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the work.

Traditional Literary Criticism

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Thinking novels as an analogy of dreams seems an excellent natural example. Same as dreams, novels are fictitious inventions of the human mind, which are although reality based but by definition they are not true. Just like a novel, dreams are said to interpret some truth, coming from one’s personal experiences or subconscious mind

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Literature, Theory and the History of Ideas: An Updated Compendium

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The papers in this book, covering a wide range of themes such as history, globalisation, colonialism, trauma, ecology, cinema, science, post-humanism, feminisms, and alternative sexualities, explore the structures of power that bring about and contour the prevailing, stereotypical and hegemonic notions of identity, gender and culture. The focal point of these interactions is the perpetual dissemination of ideas which stimulate the knowledge system with its roots spread across diverse scholarly disciplines.

This collection will be of great interest to academicians, scholars, researchers, and students, as it explores various discourses in literature, cultural studies, literary theory and film studies.

Arshad Ahammad A. is Assistant Professor of English at M.S.M. College, Kayamkulam, India. His research interests include literary and cultural theory, narratology and historical fiction. He has completed doctoral research on the representation of religious history in historical novels and submitted his thesis to the University of Kerala. He is also the author of a number of journal articles, and acted as the guest editor of the December 2019 issue of Littcrit, an internationally acclaimed research journal from Kerala.

Nada Rajan is Assistant Professor of English at M.S.M College, Kayamkulam, India. She is currently pursuing her PhD on Prison Narratives at the University of Kerala. Her areas of interest include film studies, literary and cultural theory, media studies and life writing. She is the author of Spotlight, a book on film studies, and has published a number of research articles.

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Where am I? Home -> The Evolution of Alice Criticism -> Historical Criticism

Historical criticism.

“The literary text is itself part of the interplay of discourses, a thread in the dynamic web of social meaning.” – Lois Tyson

Traditional Historicism

An historical approach to literary interpretation and analysis is perhaps the oldest and one of the most widely-used critical approach. The historical approach involves understanding the events and experiences surrounding the composition of the work, especially the life of the author, and using the findings to interpret that work of literature. Indeed, especially in Carroll’s day, study of a work of literature necessitated a study of the author’s life and experiences, as that was seen as the only way to really understand a piece of literature. Thus in the history of Alice criticism there has been a lot of research into the life of Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll to explain the Alice books. I have called this the “Biographical” interpretation.

New Historicism

The historical approach was somewhat abandoned in the mid-twentieth century, in the wake of “New Criticism,” a school which disregards the author to focus on the work itself. However, in the last thirty years or so, it has made a come-back with slightly a different approach and under the name: “New Historicism.” New Historical critics, according to Lois Tyson , consider literary texts to be “cultural artifacts that can tell us something about the interplay of discourses, the web of social meanings, operating in the time and place in which the text was written” ( 291 ). They argue that “the literary text and the historical situation from which it emerged are equally important because text (the literary work) and context (the historical conditions that produced it) are mutually constitutive: they create each other” ( Tyson 291-292 ). So, a New Historical Critic would ask not only what the Victorian Era can tell us about Alice , but also what Alice can tell us about the Victorians. The “Victorian” interpretation section incorporates elements of both the old Historical approach, and New Historicism, exploring the relationship between Alice and the social, political, philosophical, and religious ideals and issues of the Victorian Era. Additionally, New Historical critics study how literary interpretations are shaped by the culture of the various interpreters. For instance, in this section I also explore the “Psychedelic Interpretation” as an example of an approach to understanding Alice which is firmly rooted in the culture of the era in which it was developed.

Biographical Interpretation of Alice

Victorian interpretations of alice, psychedelic interpretation of alice, want to read more about new historicism.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Philosophy › Historical Criticism

Historical Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 13, 2020 • ( 0 )

Historical theory and criticism embraces not only the theory and practice of literary historiographical representation but also other types of criticism that, often without acknowledgment, presuppose a historical ground or adopt historical methods in an ad hoc fashion. Very frequently, what is called literary criticism, particularly as it was institutionalized in the nineteenth century and even up to the late twentieth century, is based on historical principles.

Aristotle commented on the origins of tragedy, Quintilian reviewed the history of oratory, and bibliographies and collections of books studied together existed in antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Yet a genuine literary or art history, finding continuity and change amid documents and data, was not possible until the growth of the historical sense in the Renaissance. Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), comprising over 150 biographies, towers above all Renaissance literary and art histories. It was no mere grouping of separate lives but an attempt to trace the progress of Italian art from Giotto to the age of Michelangelo, to establish the concept of a period (three of them for 1300-1550), and to distinguish one period from another. Despite Vasari’s example, the art history and literary history of the next two centuries were dominated by antiquarianism and chronologism.

The theory of modern historical criticism begins in the Enlightenment. Responding to the scientific revolution of the previous century, Giambattista Vico divided mathematics and physics from the humanities and what are now called the social sciences and stipulated by his verum factum principle that one can fully know only what one has made, namely, the products of language, civil institutions, and culture. In his New Science (1725) he argued that the closest knowledge of a thing lay in the study of its origins; outlined a concept of poetic logic by which one could grasp imaginatively the myths, customs, and fables of primitive cultures; and presented a theory of cultural development. Neither theology, philosophy, nor mathematics was the science of sciences: it was the “new science”—”history”—understood in Vichian terms. In his History of Ancient Art (1764) Johann Joachim Winckelmann studied “the origin, growth, change, and decline of classical art together with the different styles of various nations, times, and artists,” including Etruscan, Oriental, Greek, and Roman art. Though he surveyed “outward conditions,” he undermined his relativizing initiative in maintaining the neoclassical doctrine that Greek art is timeless and normative and in urging its imitation. Nevertheless, his definition of Greek art in terms of “noble simplicity and tranquil grandeur” distinguished the classical ideal from postclassical tendencies, thereby establishing one of the two polarities and prompting the need to define the other (quoted in Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture , 1987, xvii, 33).

In England, the Homeric studies of Thomas Blackwell (1735) and Robert Wood (1769) sought to link the epic poet to the character of the times. Blackwell enumerated “a concource of natural causes” that “conspired to produce and cultivate that mighty genius”: climate, geography, phase of cultural and linguistic development, Homer’s “being born poor, and living a stroling indigent Bard” (quoted in Mayo 50). In his pioneering History of English Poetry (1774-81) Thomas Warton explored the changing fortunes of various genres from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century in terms of primitive and sophisticated art. Samuel Johnson joined the narrative of a life, a critical analysis of the works, and a study of the poet’s mind and character in his Lives of the Poets (1779- 81), virtually creating the genre of literary biography. He also pondered writing a “History of Criticism . .. from Aristotle to the present age” (Walter Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson, 1977, 532).

Although Johann Gottfried von Herder was not willing to abandon artistic universality or German nationalism, he was too much of a historical relativist to take the art of any one society as normative. He criticized Winckelmann for valuing Greek over Egyptian art when he did not take into account their vast cultural and environmental differences. Herder showed his appreciation for these difficulties in his treatment of the Arab influence on Provençal poetry. His historical method posited two basic assumptions: “that the literary standards of one nation cannot apply directly to the work of another” and “that in the same nation standards must vary from period to period” (Miller 7). In his Ideas on the Philosophy of History (1784-91) he drew analogies from organic nature and pressed for the investigation of physical, social, and moral contexts to depict the progressive development of national character. In his view, literature ( Volkspoesie ) is the product of an entire people striving to express itself, and though he himself believed that each nation contributed to the overarching ideal of universal art, his writings were subsequently appropriated to support national literary history. In response to Winckelmann, he located the beginnings of the modern artistic spirit in the Middle Ages and considered the Roman (a mixed genre of broad, variegated content, including philosophy) to be the quintessentially modern genre.

Both the theory and the practice of literary history expanded in the wake of the French Revolution and German idealist philosophy. G. W. F. Hegel defined Geist as the collective energies of mind and feeling that produce the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, and he conceived of the history of art in three movements illustrating the dialectical progression of Geist : oriental, in which matter over which the idea and its embodiment are in perfect equilibrium; and Romantic or modern, in which the idea, freed from subjugation, cannot be adequately expressed in material form. August von Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1809-11) developed Herder’s notion of the two categories of Western art, classical and postclassical (conditioned by Christianity and mainly “northern”) for which the word “Romantic” became the preferred term. His goal was to trace “the origin and spirit of the romantic in the history of art.” In his formulation, the classic represents formal unity, natural harmony, objectivity, distinctness, the finite, and “enjoyment”; the Romantic signifies incompleteness, subjectivity, “internal discord,” indistinctness, infinity, and “desire,” idealism and melancholy being the chief characteristics of Romantic poetry (25-27). The Romantic outlook on historical writing stressed the organic nature of change, process rather than mere product. Germaine de Staël adopted the distinction between classic and Romantic in her influential De L’Allemagne (1810, On Germany ).

Michel Foucault/ New Criterion

Friedrich von Schlegel set these historical categories on firmer theoretical ground. His sociologically oriented Lectures on the History of Literature (1815) examine not only European languages but also Hebrew, Persian, and Sanskrit, thereby extending the range of comparative literary studies. Yet he advised against comparing poems of different ages and countries, preferring that they be compared with other works produced in their own time and country. He called for the study of the “national recollections” of a whole people, which are most fully revealed in literature, broadly defined and including poetry, fiction, philosophy, history, “eloquence and wit.” Literature contains “the epitome of all intellectual capabilities and progressive improvements of mankind.” For Schlegel, the modern spirit in literature reveals itself best in the novel combining the poetic and the prosaic; philosophy, criticism, and inspiration; and irony. Beyond the histories of individual nations, he applied his organicist principle to the effect that literature is “a great, completely coherent and evenly organized whole, comprehending in its unity many worlds of art and itself forming a peculiar work of art” (7-10). This is the Romantic ideal of totality, as in Hegel’s formulation that the true is the whole, and Schlegel heralded a “universal progressive poetry” (quoted in Wellek, Discriminations 29). “The national consciousness, expressing itself in works of narrative and illustration, is History .” The stage was set for the major achievements of nineteenth-century narrative literary history.

The unifying ideal of these works—the essence of nineteenth-century historicism—was that the key to reality and truth lay in the continuous unfolding of history. They were founded on a few key organizational premises: “an initial situation from which the change proceeds”; “a final situation in which the first situation eventuates and which contrasts with the first in kind, quality, or amount”; “a continuing matter which undergoes change”; and “a moving cause, or convergence of moving causes” (Crane 33). The subject matter might be an idea (the sublime), a technique (English prose rhythm), a tradition (that of “wit”), a school (the Pléiade), a reputation (Ossian), a genre or subgenre, the “mind” of a nation or race. The principal subject was treated like a hero in a plot (birth, struggle to prominence, defeat of an older generation); emplotments were of three basic types, “rise, decline, and rise and decline” (Perkins, Is Literary 39). The works as a whole were characterized by a strong teleological drive. Representative narrative histories of the national stamp are Georg Gottfried Gervinus’s History of the Poetic National Literature of the Germans (1835-42), Julian Schmidt’s History of German Literature since the Death of Lessing (1861), Francesco de Sanctis ‘s History of Italian Literature (1870-71), Wilhelm Scherer’s History of German Literature (1883), and Gustave Lanson’s Histoire de la littérature française (1894). Taking a “scientific view,” Georg Brandes considered literary criticism to be “the history of the soul,” and his supranational and comparatist Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (1872-90) traces “the outlines of a psychology” of the period 1800-1850, its thesis being “the gradual fading away and disappearance of the ideas and feelings of the preceding century, and the return of the idea of progress” ( Main i:vii).

In the mid-nineteenth century literary historians began searching among the social and natural sciences for models and analogies, for instance, Comtean positivism, John Stuart Mill’s atomistic psychology, or Charles Darwin’s evolutionary biology. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve borrowed scientific analogies of a general nature in his historical and biographical criticism. His subtle, probing works cannot be pigeonholed. “I analyze, I botanize, I am a naturalist of minds,” he said (quoted in Bate 490), and he counseled that “one cannot take too many methods or hints to know a man; he is another thing than pure spirit” (Bate 499). For Victorian literary history René Wellek proposes four main categories: the scientific and static, the scientific and dynamic, the idealistic and static, and the idealistic and dynamic ( Discriminations 153). Henry Hallam’s Introduction to the Literature of Europe (1837-39) is atomistic and cyclical, starting at 1500 and beginning again at 50-year intervals. In his History of English Literature (1863-64) Hippolyte Tain e set forth a deterministic explanation of literary works with three principal causes (race, moment, and milieu); these are the “externals,” which lead to a center, the “genuine man,” “that mass of faculties and feelings which are the inner man” ( History 1:7). His dictum “Vice and virtue are products, like vitriol and sugar” (1:11) is a chemical analogy. He chose England as if he were a scientist preparing an experiment: England had a long and continuous tradition that could be traced developmentally and up to the present, in vivo as well as in vitro. Other national literatures were rejected for one reason or another. Latin literature had too weak a start, Germany had a two-hundred-year interruption, Italy and Spain declined after the seventeenth century. A Frenchman might lack the requisite objectivity in writing the history of his own nation. The Darwinian influence can be seen in the work of Taine’s pupil Ferdinand Brunetiére. In L’Évolution des genres dans l’histoire de la littérature (1890) he treated a literary genre as if it were a genus of nature, noting its origin, rise, and fall and situating a work of art at its appropriate place on the curve.

Some literary historians produced works in several categories. Leslie Stephen’s History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) adapts an idealist viewpoint to describe the rise of agnosticism, while his English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century ( 1904) is deterministic, sociological, and “scientific”: literature is the “noise of the wheels of history” (quoted in Wellek, Discriminations 155). An example of the idealistic and dynamic category is W. J. Courthope’s six-volume History of English Poetry (1895-1910), which finds “the unity of the subject precisely where the political historian looks for it, namely, in the life of the nation as a whole,” and which uses “the facts of political and social history as keys to the poet’s meaning” (i:xv). Courthope wanted to uncover the “almost imperceptible gradations” of linguistic and metrical advance: “By this means the transition of imagination from mediaeval to modern times will appear much less abrupt and mysterious than we have been accustomed to consider it” (i:xxii). George Saintsbury’s Short History of English Literature (1898), History of Criticism (1906), and History of English Prose Rhythm (1912) are at once erudite and impressionistic, and occasionally idiosyncratic in their judgments. Obviously many literary histories were eclectic in their methodology and fell between categories.

New Historicism

Among the shortcomings of nineteenth-century narrative histories were the imbalance between the space given to the individual work of art and the background materials required to “explain” it. Too little attention was given to analysis of the work itself and to questions of literary merit. Often enough, works were submerged by their contexts and causes, which were in a sense infinite (philological, psychological, social, moral, economic, political). David Masson’s seven-volume “life and times” biography of Milton (1881) was heavily weighted toward the times; in his review James Russell Lowell complained that Milton had been reduced to “a speck on the enormous canvas” (251). The problem of multiplicity of contexts and the consequences involved in choosing among them was addressed by Johann Gustav Droysen in Historik (1857-82), which anticipates Benedetto Croce. Droysen accepted the fact that a historian’s ideological biases, often unexamined and arbitrary, came into play and predetermined the investigation. He showed how the historian could use this knowledge to advantage and mapped the different rhetorics of historical representation.

Inevitably, large-scale narrative history sank beneath its own weight and fell from favor. Literary historians chose ever-smaller areas of investigation, though with a wider attention to the variety of causal contexts. As Louis Cazamian said in his and Emile Legouis’s History of English Literature (1924), the “field of literature” needed to be widened to comprehend “philosophy, theology, and the wider results of the sciences” (1971 ed., xxi). Whatever their shortcomings, many narrative literary histories were brilliantly conceived and immensely readable, and perhaps these are the reasons why the genre has not ceased to be written.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the weaknesses and failings of the whole historicist enterprise were exposed by Friedrich Nietzsche , Wilhelm Dilthey, and Croce. Although Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) also falls in the category of narrative literary history, he attacked historical criticism in the second of his Untimely Meditations , “On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Nietzsche argued, not without irony, against history because the preoccupation with the past tended to relativize all knowledge, weigh down individual effort, and sap the vigor “for life.” The past must be “forgotten” in some sense if anything new was to be done.

Dilthey also objected to the positivist domination of history and formulated a theory of Geisteswissenschaften, or “human sciences,” comprising the social and humanistic sciences, which differed from the natural sciences in their interpretive approach. According to his method of Geistesgeschichte, material and cultural (i.e., natural) forces join in the creation of the unifying mind or spirit of a period. The critic must come into contact with the Erlebnis (“lived experience”) of a writer, a hermeneutical recapturing, or “re-experiencing,” of the past that requires not only intellect but imagination and empathy. The biographical essay becomes one of Dilthey’s preferred kinds of practical criticism: “Understanding the totality of an individual’s existence and describing its nature in its historical milieu is a high point of historical writing. . .. Here one appreciates the will of a person in the course of his life and destiny in his dignity as an end in itself” ( Introduction 37). Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (1906) illustrates his method in studies of G. E. Lessing, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Novalis, and Friedrich Hölderlin.

Like Dilthey, though from a very different point of view, Benedetto Croce offered a critique of historicism that takes place within the historicist tradition itself. In Estética (1902) Croce, who began his career as a historian of the theater and memorials of Naples, attacked dry positivist historicism and sociological criticism for dissolving the essential quality of the literary work, its “intuition,” into myriad causes (psychology, society, race, other literary works). He objected strongly to the organization of literary history on the basis of genres, schools, rhetorical tropes, meters, sophisticated versus folk poetry, the sublime, and so on. These were “pseudoconcepts,” useful labels perhaps for a given purpose but essentially arbitrary designations standing between reader and text. Moreover, none of these “pseudo-concepts” could help decide a case between “poetry” and “nonpoetry”: “All the books dealing with classification and systems of the arts could be burned without any loss whatever.” Croce argued on behalf of the presentness and particularity of the “intuition”; what is past is made present and vital in the act of judgment and narration: “Every true history is contemporary history” ( Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic , 1902, trans. Douglas Ainslie, 1953, 114; History 11). His goal was to bring about a cultural renewal in which the traditional humanistic subjects, history and poetry, might once again play their central educative role and a new form of literary history would replace historicism. Croce’s critique was one of the first salvos in the idealist attack on science and positivism that continued well into the twentieth century. Aestheticism itself contributed to the disparagement of science and the revival of the idea of the genius, wholly exceptional, inexplicable, “above” an age.

In the twentieth century literary history lost the theoretical high ground in the academy. Modernism , New Criticism , Russian Formalism , nouvelle critique —all have an antihistoricist bias, posit the autonomy of the work of art, and focus on structural and formal qualities. At the same time, though the age of criticism had succeeded the age of historicism, literary history remained the most common activity within literary studies. Formalist and psychological approaches to a work of art are often found to lean on historical premises or to require a historically determined fact to build a case. As for narrative literary history, the errors and lessons of the nineteenth century were not in vain, and the achievements of modern historical scholarship are characterized by an awareness of the intellectual and rhetorical problems involved in their production.

Twentieth-century literary history offers a variety of models. One of the most common is a dialectical structure in which the main subject oscillates between two poles. In Cazamian’s history, long a standard work, phases of reason and intelligence (the classical) alternate with phases of imagination and feeling (Romantic). The dialectic of J. Livingston Lowes’s Convention and Revolt in Poetry (1919) is apparent from its title. The same writer’s Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927) is an exhaustive source study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.” In another model the literary historian depicts a “time of troubles” or “babble-like era of confusion—a time of transition from a purer past to a repurified future” (LaCapra 99). R. S. Crane and David Perkins each argue on behalf of “immanentist” theories that study the processes of change from a viewpoint within a tradition. Writers are compared and contrasted with predecessors and successors, and newness and difference are valued. Examples are Brunetifere, the Russian Formalists, W. Jackson Bate’s Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970), Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (1973) and The Map of Misreading (1975), and Perkins’s History of Modern Poetry (2 vols., 1976-87), but Vasari’s Lives also has an immanentist theme. Some of the finest modern literary histories mix history, narrative, and criticism, selecting their contexts as particular works of art suggest them: F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), with its attempt to portray the Geist of transcendentalism; Douglas Bush’s English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660 (1945); and A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh (1948). The period has also produced major literary biographies in Leon Edel on Henry James, Richard Ellmann on James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, and W. Jackson Bate on John Keats and Samuel Johnson.

In the era of postmodermism the theory of literary history has again received serious attention in Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and New Historicism . Postmodern literary histories flout the conventions of historical narrative and display the gaps, differences, discontinuities, crossing (without touching) patterns, not in the hope of capturing the essence of reality, but with the intention of showing that reality has no single essence. The avowedly “postmodern” Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), which has 66 writers, “acknowledges diversity, complexity, and contradiction by making them structural principles, and it forgoes closure as well as consensus.” “No longer is it possible, or desirable,” the editor claims, “to formulate an image of continuity” (xiii, xxi). The encyclopedic idea has replaced historical narration. New Historicism situates the text at the center of intense contextualization, a single episode being examined from multiple perspectives. This runs the risk of overcontextualization, loss of the larger picture, and failure to account for the dynamics of historical change.

In his skeptical Is Literary History Possible? (1992) Perkins reviews the theory and practice of literary history and comments on the “insurmountable contradictions in organizing, structuring, and presenting the subject” and “the always unsuccessful attempt of every literary history to explain the development of literature that it describes.” At the same time, he defends both the writing and the reading of literary history, maintaining that objectivity is not an all-or-nothing affair. Literary history must not “surrender the idea) of objective knowledge,” for without it “the otherness of the past would entirely deliquesce in endless subjective and ideological reappropriations” (ix, 185). His humanistic position, skeptical of system and classification, shows one way through the antihistoricism and skepticism of the present, while remaining aware of the pitfalls that have beset historical criticism in the past.

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