Contemporary Literary Theory

COMTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY

1.     Formalist criticism

Formalist criticism emphasizes the work as an independent creation, a self contained unit, something to be studied in itself, not as part of larger context, such as the author’s life or an historical period. The emphasis is on the form of the work, the relationship between the parts- the construction of the plot, the contrasts between the characters, the functions of rhyme, the point of view etc.

Cleanth Brooke’s ‘article of faith’- the literary criticism is a description and evaluation of its objects. That the primary concern of the criticism is with the problem of unity- the kind of whole which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts to each other in building up this whole. That is the successful work, form and content cannot be separated.

Formalist criticism is intrinsic criticism not extrinsic as it concentrates on the work itself, independent of the writer and of writer’s background- that is independent of biography, psychology, sociology and history. The gist is that a work of literature is complex, unified, and free- standing. In fact, of course bring outside knowledge to the work. For example, if a person has read Hamlet, can hardly read any other tragedy by Shakespeare, without taking into consideration the fact that what a Shakespearean tragedy is? Or can be. The assumption that “meaning’ is fully and completely present within the text is not much in favour today, when many literary critics argue that active or subjective reader and not the author of the text makes the “meaning”. A formalist critic may say that we see with increasing clarity what the work is really like, and what it really means. Similarly when the authors write and revise a text, they may change their understanding of what they are doing. A story that began as a light- hearted joke may turn into something far more serious than the writer imagined at the start, but, at           least for the formalist critic, the final work contains all the meanings that all competent readers can perceive.

In practice, formalist criticism usually takes one of the two forms, explication (the unfolding of meaning line by line or even word by word) of analysis (the examination of the relations of parts)

Thus formalist criticism assumes that a work of art is stable. An artist constructs a coherent, comprehensible work, thus conveying to the reader the emotion or an idea. Eliot said that a writer cannot just pour out the emotions onto the page. Rather, he said in an essay entitled “Hamlet and his Problems” (1919); “the only way of expressing emotions in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation a chain of events which shall be the formula of the particular emotion. Formalist criticism (also known as New Criticism), began to achieve prominence in the late 1920s, an was the dominant form from the 1930s until about 1970s.

2.     Russian Formalism

The formalists were a group of critics in Russia at the time of 1917 revolution. There thinking about literature planted the seeds that eventually led to Structuralism. Formalism started as an activity closely linked to linguistics with an interest in the scientific examination of style. Much of the work was detailed, technical research into metre, rhyme and such topics as sound in poetry, but most readers are more likely to respond to the general view of art the formalists offered. Literary language was seen as the special kind of language. It was suggested that, rather than presenting the picture of the world, art defamiliarises or “makes strange”; literary work disrupts ordinary language, looking at the world in an strange way.

The central concept that formalism introduces is this idea that the language in a literary text is very unusual, that the text cannot simply be looked through in order to appreciate a picture of life. Structuralism and Deconstruction also start from this idea of the oddness of writing; both of these modern movements are characterized by a refusal to look beyond or outside the language. The text is regarded as a linguistic construct that does not offer a clear window on the world. But the tradition that Russian formalism initiate has much wider consequences, consequences that go beyond a philosophical concern with the nature of language. Understanding these consequences help us understand the whole thrust of modern criticism.

The Russian Formalists were reacting against an inherited social order and received ideas about society and the self, although their lack of interest in the content of literary works invited strong disapproval from Marxist critics and from Stalin.

Formalism views literature primarily as a specialized mode of language, and proposes a fundamental opposition between the literary use of language and the ordinary, ‘practical’ use of language. It conceives the central function of ordinary language to be the communication to auditors of a message, or information, by reference to the world existing outside the language. In contrast, it conceives literary language to be self focused, in that its function is not to make extrinsic references, but to offer us a special mode of experience by drawing attention to its own “formal” features- that is, to interrelationships among the linguistic signs themselves. As Roman Jacobson wrote in 1921: “the object of study in literary is not literature but ‘literariness’, that is, what makes a given work a literary work.

American New Criticism, although it developed independently, is sometimes called ‘formalist’ because like European formalism it stresses the analysis of the literary work as a self- sufficient verbal entity, independent of reference either to the state of mind of the author or to the ‘external’ world. It also conceives poetry, like the European formalists, as a special mode of language whose distinctive features are defined in terms of their opposition to practical or scientific language. Strong opposition to formalism, both in its American and European varieties, has been voiced by some Marxist critics, and more recently by the proponents of reader-response criticism, speech-act theory, and New historicism; these last three types of criticism all reject the view that there is a sharp and definable division between ordinary language and literary language.

3.          The Chicago Critics

Chicago critics, sometimes called Neo-Aristotelians, were a group of critics associated with the University of Chicago between the 1930s and the 1950s. This name was given to them by John Holloway. They emphasized a close reading and analysis of the texts in order to redefine the various genres of literature. Influenced by the analytic and cultural implications of Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’, these critics were not only interested in developing a methodology for the analysis of “concrete artistic wholes” but they were also concerned with the relationship of criticism to the humanities. The Chicago critics differed from those associated with the New Criticism in their concerns with the distinctions among genres rather than in the latter’s examination of the uniqueness of poetry without differentiating among the various kinds.

In the 1930s and up to the mid 40s of the 20^th century the New Criticism acted as a force in American historical scene. However, a reaction was already forming under the leadership of Ronald S Crane, in the late 30s in the Chicago school of Neo- Aristotelians. The Chicago critics gave an authoritative expression to their critical theories and practices in a book, Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern. They declared that most of the New Critics, under the still powerful assumption that poetry is best considered as a kind of discourse, continue to read all poems as if their authors have constructed them on identical principles, treating lyrics and novels, tragedies and essays by means of the same distinctions. Secondly, the CC’s found that in NC the ‘parts’ of the poem were scrutinized to the neglect of the whole object. At the same time the CCs have claimed for themselves a devotion to the artistic whole, and in this they are proud of having Aristotle on their side.

The Chicago critics call themselves Neo- Aristotelians claiming kinship with Aristotle because of-

1.     There stress on the wholeness of a work of literature.

2.     Their recognition of Aristotle’s distinction between different imitative arts in terms of means, object, and manner of imitation, and not isolating the medium of language for special distinction, and on that basis claiming a distinction for poetry among the arts.

3.     Their recognition of only one fundamental concept of literature and that is organic, and not like Ransom among the NCs conceding the possibility of an inorganic poetry as well which is built on the principles of logical structure.

4.     Their acceptance of Aristotle’s distinctions between literary kinds and advocacy of genre criticism.    

4.          Queer Theory

The development of lesbian and gay studies arose in response to political activism of the 1960s although its incorporation within formal education was much slower. After WW II, a time during which homosexual identity politics began to emerge with Harry Hay’s Mattachine Society and a growing gay/lesbian bar culture, gay and lesbians were forced to remain ‘closeted’ if they wished to lead normal lives. It was until the late 1960s – and most memorably in 1969 with the famous Stonewall riots at a New York gay bar that “Gay Liberation” became an open public issue. The slogan of the Stonewall riots fired the imagination of many persecuted gays and lesbians – “We are queer. We are here. Accept it!” The term “queer” has since then come to be accepted in many circles as all encompassing idea that identifies a wide range of sexual minorities. “Queer” includes homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people of all varieties. However like all theoretical concepts “queer” theories are constantly redefining themselves, primary by expanding the boundaries of what it means to be queer and “straight”, and multiple grids of negotiations that fall therein.

The issues concerning “Queer” theory revolve around basically two schools of thought. One the essentialists who believe that homosexuality is a biologically determined fact of existence i.e. one is about “coming out” or “she or he was always different”, followed by a discovery of truth about oneself.

This debate is central to any discussion of gay/lesbian “literature” and the questions one needs to ask oneself are: what exactly is gay/lesbian “literature”. Is it writing by lesbians/gays? Can heterosexual/ bisexual people write stories that may profitably be included in gay or lesbian literature? What about writers who “came out” after a long time – does one go back to their writing and “pick” clues about their sexual repression and make that writing also part of gay/lesbian literature?  

5.     Intertextuality

Intertextuality is the interconnectedness among texts, or the concept that any text is the amalgam of others, either because it exhibits signs of influence or because its language inevitably contains common points of reference with other texts through such things as allusion quotation, genre, stylistic features, and even revisions. The critic Julia Kristeva, who popularized and is often credited withcoining this term, views any given work as part of a larger fabric of literary discourse, part of a continuum including the future as well as the past. Other critics have argued for an even broader use and understanding of the term, maintaining that literary history per se too narrow a context within which to read and understand a literary text. When understood in this way, intertextuality could be used by a new historicist or culture critic to refer to the significant interconnectedness between a literary text and contemporary, non- literary discussions of the issues represented in the literary text. Or it could be used by a poststructuralist to suggest that a work of literature can only be recognized and read within a vast field of signs and tropes that is like a text and that makes any single text self- contradictory and undecidable.   

6.     Post – modernism

Post – modernism refers to certain radically experimental works of literature and art produced after WW II. Post – modernism is distinguished from modernism, which generally refers to the revolution in art and literature that occurred during the period 1910-1930, particularly following the disillusioning experience of WW I. The postmodern era, with its potential for mass destruction and its shocking history of genocide, has evoked a continuing disillusionment similar to that widely experienced during the Modern period. Much of postmodernist writing reveals and highlights the alienation of individuals and the meaninglessness of human existence. Postmodernists frequently stress that humans desperately cling to illusions of security to conceal and forget the void on which their lives are perched. Not surprisingly, PMs have shared with their modernist precursors the goal of breaking away from traditions through experimentation with new literary devices, forms and styles.

Postmodernists, revolting against a certain modernist tendency towards elitist “high art”, have also generally made a concerted appeal to popular culture. Cartoons, music, pop art, and television have thus become acceptable and even common media for postmodernist artistic expression. Postmodernist literary developments include such genres as Absurd, the antinovel, concrete poetry, and other forms of avant – grade poetry written in free verse and challenging the ideological assumptions of contemporary society. What postmodernist theatre, fiction and poetry have in common is the view that literary language is its own reality, not a means of representing reality.

7.     Post – colonial criticism

A type of cultural criticism postcolonial criticism usually involves the analysis of literary texts produced in countries and cultures have come under the control of European colonial power at some point of time in their history. Alternatively it can refer to the analysis of texts written about colonized place by writers hailing from the colonizing culture.

Some scholars and critics criticize the term postcolonial as misleading and even confusing, because it has been used to refer both to works written during and after colonial period in various countries. Furthermore, the term refers both to work by and about colonial cultures. For still others, it implies uniformity within the postcolonial experience in general and certain postcolonial cultures in particular that is belied by difference in race, gender and class. Ireland, for instance is a post colonial culture and country, and yet because of racial similarities between the colonized and colonizing culture, the Irish experience was very different from, say, the Indian experience under English colonial rule. Analogously, within India the experience of colonized women differed from that of men, whose experiences, in turn, varied according to social caste and its implications for education.

In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said, a pioneer of postcolonial criticism and studies, has focused on the way in which the colonizing First World has invented false images and myths of the Third (postcolonial) world – stereotypical images and myths which have conveniently justified Western exploitation and domination of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures and people. Postcolonial critic Patrick Brantlinger, in his book Rules of Darkness (1988), shows how Conrad both critiqued and reinforced imperialist and racist assumptions in his Heart of Darkness. Homi K. Bhabha, who has shown an interest in the “diaspora”, or scattering of people from colonized areas, has suggested that modern western culture is actually best understood from the postcolonial perspectives.

Among feminist critics, the postcolonial perspective has inspired an attempt to recover the whole cultures of women heretofore ignored or marginalized, women who speak not only from colonized but also from colonizing places to which many of them fled. The stories of some of these women are told indirectly- “between the lines”, so to speak- of European novels.

Postcolonial criticism has been influenced not only by Marxist thought but also by the work of Michel Foucault, whose theories about power of discourses have influenced the new historicism, and by deconstruction which has challenged not only hierarchical, binary opposition.

8.     Phenomenological Criticism  

Phenomenology is an approach to literature which looks at the personality behind the work, has always been popular, especially with the general readers. Academic criticism, however, is somewhat out of sympathy with such an approach, as it looks at the author rather than at the text. Phenomenological criticism seeks to bridge the gap between biography and criticism by approaching the author through the text. It starts with the work and, through it, attempts to trace the pattern of the author’s mind.

The originator of phenomenology was the German philosopher Husserl. He regarded it as an attempt to describe human consciousness rather than the unique consciousness of an individual author. Phenomenology as an approach to literature is usually associated with theory and practice of the Geneva school of critics, most notably George Poulet. The central idea is that the critic should empty his or her mind of presuppositions and then responding directly to the text, discover the unique mode of consciousness of the author. This refers to as consciousness of the consciousness of another. It is clearly a form of romantic criticism, intent on getting at the unique personality behind the work. Most criticism this century has been concerned to trace a view of the world in the text rather than being interested in the author in this kind of way; the stress in phenomenology is on something elusive and hidden in the mind of the author. The critic cannot empty the mind of preconceptions and so inevitably imposes ideas on the text; therefore we might be seeing the consciousness of the critic rather than the consciousness of the author. As this approach has been more influential in Europe rather than Britain or America, the only phenomenological critic most of us are likely to encounter is J. Hills Miller who subsequently rejected such an approach, opting instead of structuralism and deconstruction. Yet as Miller’s early work on Dickens and Hardy indicates, in the hands of a good critic phenomenology can prove a productive approach. As is so often the case, it is not the theory that matters but the skill of the critic, and in the hands of a good critic any theory can produce good criticism. This is a method of philosophical inquiry which lays stress on the perceiver’s vital and central role in perceiving the meaning.

9.     Hermeneutics      

In Christian theology hermeneutics is the finding and interpretation of the spiritual truth in the Bible. This is an important quest, so that the truths of the Gospels, for instance may be interpreted and reinterpreted from generation to generation and thus made relevant in different eras. In more general terms, more recently, hermeneutics has been concerned with the interpretation and understanding of the human action. As far literature is concerned it is to do with the way textual meaning is communicated. The history of hermeneutics theory dates back from the work of German Protestant theologians of the 17^th century who developed methods of understanding the Bible to support their theological views. The circle is the movement from a guess at the ‘whole’ of the work. It embodied the belief that part and whole are interdependent and have some necessary organic relationship. (German philosopher and historian Wilhelm Dilthey- 1833-1911)

10.             Narratology

Narratology means the analysis of the narratives. It is a by-product of structuralism, which encouraged an interest in the structures that underlie literary texts. Essentially narratology is concerned with the sequence and patterns of events in a story. The most accessible technical book on narratology is probably Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1980).

Narratology could be said to begin with the workof the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, who, in The Morphology of a Folk Tale (1928) drew attention to seven basic patterns in stories.

11.             Semiotics/Semiology

The basic founders of modern semiotics and semiology were the philosopher C S Pierce (1839-1914) and the linguistician Ferdinand De Saussure (1857-1913). Strictly speaking, semiology is the science of signs and semiotics is the theory of sound systems in language.

12.             Literary canon formation

The Greek word ‘kanon’ signifying a measure rod or a rule was extended to denote a list or catalogue, then came to be applied to the list of books in Hebrew Bible and the New Testament which were designated by church authorities as comprising the genuine Holy scriptures. A number of writing related to those in the Scriptures, but not admitted in the canon, is called apocrypha; eleven books which have been included in the Roman biblical canon are considered apocryphal by Protestants.

The term “canon” was later used in a literary application, to signify the list of secular works accepted by experts as genuinely written by a particular author. We speak thus of “the Chaucer canon” and “the Shakespeare canon”, and refer to other works that have sometimes been attributed author.

13.             Rhetorical criticism

14.             Lesbian and Gay criticism

Lesbian and gay criticisms have roots in feminist criticism; that is feminist criticism introduced many of the questions that these other, newer developments are now exploring.

Now some of the questions that this criticism addresses: (1) Do lesbians and gays read in ways that differ from the ways straight people read? (2) Do they write in ways that differ from those of straight people? According to Meyers, closeted homosexuals in the past, writing out of guilt and pain, produced a distinctive literature that is more interesting than the portrayed lesbians and gays, and how have lesbian and gay and lesbian writers portrayed straight women and men? What strategies did lesbian and gay writers use to make their work acceptable to a general public in an age when lesbian and gay behavior was unmentionable?

Shakespeare’s work – not only the sonnets, which praise a beautiful male friend – has stimulated a fair amount of gay criticism.

One assumption in much lesbian and gay writing is that although gender generally influences the way we read, reading is a skill that can be learnt, and therefore straight people – aided by lesbian and gay critics can learn to read, with pleasure and profit, lesbian and gay writers. This assumption of course also underlies much feminist criticism, which often assumes that men must stop ignoring books by women and must learn how to read them, and, in fact, how to read – with newly opened eyes – the sexist writing of men of the past and present. 

15.             Feminist criticism

Feminist criticism can be traced back to the work of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), but chiefly it grew out of women’s Movement of the 1960s. The Women’s movement at first tended to hold that women are pretty much the same as men and therefore should be treated equally, but much recent feminist criticism has emphasized and explored the differences between women and men.   

16.             Structuralism

The word “structure” has been used in different contexts in various disciplines of Science and Humanities. All the social sciences resort to it abundantly. It is widely used in anthropology and linguistics. We can speak of the structure of a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a book, and so forth. The formal structure of a play consists of its acts and scenes and their independent balance. The non – formal structure comprises the events and actions which take place. One may think that the structure of a poem is its central statement or arguments (its logical structure) while everything else (the words, their sounds, rhyme, imagery etc) is texture. This is the common notion of structure but this is not what we call structuralism in literature. The word structuralism is used in literature in its specialized sense.

To begin with, structure implies a system. A system is a whole, a totality. A structure has elements and the elements can be arranged and rearranged. The arrangement and rearrangement will modify the structure but will not change it. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand De Saussure conceived of language as a sign system that communicates in relationship or interdependence. A sign consists of signifier (sound system) and signified. According to Saussure the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary. Structuralism is based on the idea of the sign as a union of signified and the signifier.

As for as literature and literary criticism are concerned, structuralism challenges the long – standing belief that a work of literature (or any kind of literary text) reflects a given reality; a literary text is, rather, constituted of other conventions and texts. Structuralism is in explicit opposition to mimetic criticism (the view that literature is primarily an imitation of reality), to expressive criticism (the view that literature truly expresses the feeling and temperament of its author), and to any form of the view that literature is a mode of communication between author and the readers.

1.     In the structuralist view, what had been called a ‘literary work’ becomes simply a text, that is, a mode of writing constituted by a play of component elements according to specifically literary conventions and codes. These factors may generate an illusion of reality, but have no truth value, nor even any reference to reality existing outside the literary system itself.

2.     The individual author or ‘subject’ is allowed no initiative, expressive intentions or the design as the ‘origin’ or producer of a work. Instead the conscious ‘self ‘is declared to be the construct that is itself the product of the workings of the linguistic system and the mind of an author is described as an imputed ‘space’.

Structuralism replaces author by the reader as the central agency in criticism.     The mode of operation in structuralist criticism is an analysis of a particular work with an intention to discover its meaning. On the contrary, the structuralist will dissect a work to discover the structure. Unlike grammatical analysis when a sentence can be related to a particular structure in the grammatical system, structuralist criticism cannot relate a work to a structure in the literary system because there is no such well defined structure or system. What exactly is the structure of literature has not been discovered or understood. This can be called as structuralist dilemma. That is why structural criticism has a duel function to perform: first analyze a work of art, and secondly, discover or define the underlying structure. The structuralist examines a work to discover how meaning is shaped or how meaning is made possible and thereby discovers the basic structures of literature.

17.             Deconstruction

Deconstruction, or deconstructive or post – structural criticism, can almost be characterized as the opposite of everything for which formalist criticism stands. Deconstruction begins with the assumption that the world is unknowable and that language is unstable, elusive, and unfaithful. Language is all of these things because meaning is largely generated by opposition: ‘hot’ means something in opposition to ‘cold’. Deconstructionists seek to show that a literary work (usually called “a text” or “a discourse”) inevitably is self contradictory. Unlike formalist critics, who hold that a competent author constructs a coherent work with a stable meaning, and the competent readers can perceive this meaning, deconstructionists hold that a work has no coherent meaning at the center. Jonathan Culler, in On Deconstruction (1982) says that to deconstruct a discourse is to show how it undermines the philosophy it asserts. Deconstruction is valuable in so far as – like the new criticism – it encourages close, rigorour attention to the text. Furthermore, in its rejection of the claim that a work has a single stable meaning, deconstruction has had a positive influence on the study of literature. The problem with deconstruction however is that too often it is very reductive, telling the same story about every text.

Aware that their emphasis on the instability of language implies that their own texts are unstable or even incoherent, some deconstructionists seem to aim at entertaining rather than edifying. They probably would claim that they do not deconstruct meaning in the sense of destroying it; rather they might say they exuberantly multiply meanings, and to this end they may use such devices as puns, irony and allusions, somewhat as a poet might, and just as though they think they are as creative as the writers they are commenting on.

18.             Post – Structuralism

Late in the 1960s, structuralism became subject to a rigorous and lasting critique of its thinking and methods. Post – structuralism is a more rigorous working out of the possibilities, implications and shortcomings of structuralism and its basis in Saussurean linguistics itself. In a sense it complements structuralism by offering alternative modes of inquiry, explanation and interpretation.

Post – structuralism doubts the adequacy of structuralism and, as far as literature is concerned, tends to reveal that the meaning of any text is, of its nature, unstable. Saussure’s fundamental distinction between signifier and signified is at the heart of the instability.

19.            Reader – response criticism or reception theory

All writing about literature begins with some response, but specialists in literature disagree greatly about the role that response plays, or should play, in experiencing literature and in writing about it.

The connections readers make between themselves and the lives in most of the books they read, are not, on the whole, connections based on ethnic or professional identities, but rather connections of states of consciousness, for instance a young person’s sense of isolation from the family, or a young person’s sense of guilt for initial sexual experiences. Before we reject a work either because it seems too close to us or on the other hand too far from our experience, we probably should try to follow the advice of Virginia Woolf, who said, “Do not dictate to author, and try to become him. Nevertheless, some literary works of the past may today seem intolerable, at least in parts. We should, however, try to reconstruct the cultural assumptions of the age in which in which the work has been written. If we do so, we may find that it, in some ways, has reflected its age; in other ways it challenged that culture.

Reader – response criticism, then, says that the ‘meaning’ of a work is not merely something put into the work by the writer; rather, the ‘meaning’ is an interpretation created or constructed or produced by the reader as well as the writer.

Against the objective view on can argue thus: no author can fully control a reader’s response to every detail of the text. No matter how carefully constructed the text is, it leads something – indeed a great deal – to the reader’s imagination.      

20.             Marxist criticism

One form of historical criticism is Marxist criticism, named for Karl Marx (1818-83). Marxist criticism today is varied, but essentially it sees history primarily as a struggle between socio – economic classes, and it sees literature and everything else as the product of economic forces of the period.

For Marxism economics is the base or infrastructure; on this base rests a ‘superstructure’ of ideology (law, politics, philosophy, religion, and the arts, including literature), reflecting the interest of the dominant class. Thus literature is a material product, produced like bread or battleship in order to be consumed in a given society. Like every other product, literature is a product of work and it does work. A bourgeois (habitant) society, for example, will produce literature that in one way or other celebrates bourgeois values, for instance individualism. These works serve to assure the society that its values are solid, even universal.

21.             Historical criticism

Historical criticism studies a work within its historical context. Thus a student of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, or Macbeth – plays in which ghosts appear – may try to find out about Elizabethans’ attitude towards ghosts. We may find for instance, that the Elizabethans took ghosts more seriously than we do, or, on the other hand, we may find that the ghosts were explained in various ways, for instance sometimes as figments of the imagination and sometimes as shapes taken by a devil in order to mislead he virtuous. The historical critic assumes that the writers, however individualistic, are shaped by the particular social contexts in which they live. One can put it in this way: The goal of a historical criticism is to understand how people in the past thought and felt. It assumes that such understanding can enrich our understanding of a particular work. The assumption is, however, disputable, since one may argue that the artist may not have shared the age’s view on this or that.  

22.             The new historicism

The new historicism holds that there is only one version - our narrative, our representation – of the past. In this view, each age projects its own preconceptions of the past; historians may think they are revealing only their own historical situation and their personal preferences.

The new historicism is especially associated with Stephen Greenblatt, who popularized the term in 1982 in the preface to a collection of essays published in the journal Genre.

23.             Biographical criticism

One kind of historical research is the study of the biography, which for our purposes includes not only biographies but also autobiographies, diaries, journals, letters and so on. What experiences did (for example) Mark Twain undergo? Are some of the apparently sensational aspects of Huckelberry Finn in fact close to events that Twain experienced?

The really good biographies not only tell us about the life of the author but they enable us to return to the literary text with a deeper understanding of how they came to be what they are.  

24.             Psychological (or psychoanalytical) criticism

One form that biographical study may take is psychological or psychoanalytical criticism, which usually examines the author and the author’s writings in the framework of Freudian psychology. A central doctrine of Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) is the Oedipus complex, the view that all males unconsciously wish to displace their fathers and to sleep with their mothers. According to Freud, hatred for the father and love of the mother, normally repressed, may appear disguised in dreams. Works of arts, like dreams, are disguised versions of repressed wishes. Notice that psychoanalytic interpretations usually take us away from what the author consciously intended; they purport to tell us what the work reveals, whether or not the author was aware of this meaning. The ‘meaning’ of the content is not found in the content, but in the author’s psyche.