Literary theory

Literary theory is the theory (or the philosophy) of the interpretation of literature and literary criticism. Its history begins with classical Greek poetics and rhetoric and includes, since the 18th century, aesthetics and hermeneutics. In the 20th century, "theory" has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts, most of which are informed by various strands of Continental philosophy. (In much academic discussion, the terms "literary theory" and "Continental philosophy" are nearly synonymous, though some scholars would argue that a clear distinction can be drawn between the two.)

Schools of literary theory

Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors. (In many of these cases, such as those of the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, these authors were not literary critics and did not primarily write about literature; but, since their work has been broadly influential in literary theory, they are nonetheless listed here.)

Related Topics:
Michel Foucault - Claude Lévi-Strauss

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• American pragmatism and other American approaches
• Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty
• Cultural studies - emphasized the role of literature in everyday life
• Paul Gilroy, John Guillory
• Deconstruction - a strategy of close reading which draws out "undecidable" interpretive decisions, rendering intelligible what the text does not itself think but nevertheless allows to be thought
• Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell
• Feminism (see feminist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of gender relations
• Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Elaine Showalter
• Formalism
• German hermeneutics and philology
• Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Erich Auerbach
• Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) - which emphasized themes of class conflict
• Georg Lukács, Valentin Voloshinov, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin,
• New Criticism - which looked at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issues
• W.K. Wimsatt, F.R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren
• New historicism - which examines a text by also examining other texts of the time period
• Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, H. Aram Vesser
• Postcolonialism - examines literature produced by countries that were once occupied by a governing force
• Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha
• Post-structuralism - criticism of structuralism
• Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, the late Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Maurice Blanchot
• Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) - looks at works with close attention paid to the unconscious mind of the author
• Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, Viktor Tausk
• Queer theory - examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender in literature
• Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick
• Reader Response - focusses upon the active response of the reader to a text
• Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall
• Russian Formalism
• Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp
• Structuralism and semiotics (see semiotic literary criticism) -- examined the underlying structures in the content of a text (plot, for example)
• Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the early Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jurij Lotman
• Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Northrop Frye, Leslie Fiedler