Introduction In 1959, takes place in a society where the black working-class family always struggles to deal with the oppressive circumstances that dictate their lives. It was a time when blacks and whites were still distressed by segregation. It shows the sacrifices people make to...
When one first thinks of Cinderella and what it’s attempting to teach us, oftentimes kindness, gentleness, and humbleness are common starting points. However these morals, or lessons that the story wants to get across to us, change through different adaptations, sometimes into an unrecognizable lesson...
The intriguing statement “Literature is the question minus the answer,” attributed to Roland Barthes, invites us to explore the intricate tapestry of meaning woven within the pages of literary works. This essay delves into the depth of Barthes’ observation, delving into its significance within the...
The film How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) tells the story of the Grinch, a hairy green fur creature that has a smile from ear to ear. Exiled from Whoville, he has been living in a cave on top of the mountain with his loyal...
In Willstead town, in North Carolina strange things are happening. Do you want to know more? Well in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine LEngle a wonderful writer tells all the weird things that are happening. Madeleine LEngle was born in 1918 and she is...
Nineteen Minutes is written by Jodi Picoult, it was a very down to earth type of book and it had a very good story line. The main idea of the book was about how a student named peter would get bullied non stop and picked...
This paper will go in depth about African American literary criticism, what it is, and how we can apply it to the introduction of Robin D.G. Kelley’s, “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination” as well as a short summary and interpretation of the text. Another...
Introduction: There is one thing that several people fear in this world other than spiders, and that “thing” is death. Unfortunately death is inevitable, and each and every one of us is bound to die at some point in our life. In The Death of...
In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, Gloria Anzaldúa narrates her experience growing up as a Chicana, a Mexican-American living in the United States. Growing up in Texas, people around her made her feel that speaking Chicano Spanish or English with a Chicano accent was...
Criticism is an integral part of the literary world. The importance of professional literary criticism is invaluable because a critic sees the work as a whole and at the same time takes into account its individual elements: the plot, composition, image system and language. The...
How can we best reach the most precise and complete knowledge of a literary work? Ought we to take in to account the historical, political and social contexts surrounding the writing and reception of the work? Are we to trust the avowed intention of the...
Introduction “A White Heron” is a short story written by Sarah Orne Jewett and it revolves around a young girl named Sylvia. She initially resided in the city with her parents, but later on, is seen to be living with her grandmother in the country...
Nature is an important feature of poetic realism, an offshoot of German realism in the late 19th century. Gottfried Keller, the author of the novel Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (Romeo and Juliet in the Village), is a Swiss writer who belongs to this...
“Postmodern Blackness” is one of several essays that bell hooks has written. It is, by its nature, a philosophical essay in which the Afro-American writer mixes what is literary with what is racial. Hence, in it she attempts at evoking the exclusionary role that the...
The composed landmark of Coleridge’s basic work is contained in 24 sections of Biographia Literaria (1815– 17). In this basic disquisition, Coleridge concerns himself with the act of feedback, as well as, with its hypothesis. In his down to earth way to deal with feedback,...
Introduction ‘A Rose for Emily’ is one of the outstanding works of William Faulkner. Through the life of Emily, the work shows the contradiction between the values and the system in the south and the south, and the decline of the southern tradition is reflected...
In colonial America, puritan writers’ style is nearly the same as Saint Augustine’s spiritual biography. Its content is fundamentally drawn upon many references to the Bible. Mary White Rowlandson’s captivity narrative serves as the best example of a typical puritan narrative. Many scholars are used...
Be careful for what you wish for. In the fable ‘What of this Goldfish Would You Wish’ by Etgar Keret, Sergei one of the main characters happened to find a magical gold fish that grants him three wishes. Since Sergei is a loner he now...
It is paramount to first define femininity, before we can identify whether works of literature present it as a performance, and not a natural mode of being. The definition of femininity changes with the decades. In the 1920s a feminine appearance was considered to be...
Author William Golding of “Lord of the Flies” and director Robert Zemeckis of “Cast Away” use a range of stylistic conventions such as setting, character/conflict and symbolism to explore the theme of survival. These texts encourage as to consider the physical and psychological aspects of...
Abstract This study aims at analyzing the structure of novel Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban that created by J.K. Rowling and published in the United Kingdom on 8th July 1999. A literary work contains intrinsic elements as well as extrinsic elements. The examples...
The literature in the 19th century was divided by modernist and traditionalist. These two sides divided society into sectors with different ideas. These different viewpoints created conflict in the United States in the 1920s. Modernist influenced literature in the way that, they spoke about the...
The aim of this essay is to show and analyze the differences and similarities that Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman have had in connection with the symbol of death, as they have expressed this subject in their poems, not only in terms of structure they...
Narratives are cultural devices that represent their era, playing an important academic role in reflecting and developing the values, ideas and attitudes of their context, and even warning the audience about what could happen in the future. Appropriations are a clear example of this where...
The author, Elizabeth Bishop, wrote a poem titled “One Art” which took place 1927, in Boston. In the story, the main character, Elizabeth Bishop, talks about and describes the feeling of losing things. In this poem Bishop talked about what she has lost and how...
This assignment will focus on the children’s script ‘The Little Red Riding Hood’ as the source of data for analysis. The assignment will review the function of flouting (as described by Grice’s cooperative principle) within the tale and consider whether this function is prevalent and...
My paper is based on such critical approach of psychoanalytic and New Historicist Theory. It is generally accepted that new historicism is a literary theory based on the idea that literature should be studied and interpreted within the context of both the history of the...
Literature styles, methods, and forms influence the reader’s perception of the text a lot while he reads the composition. As for example, the works of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries are perceived differently in comparison with the ones written in the last one hundred...
In Kate Chopin’s short story titled “The Story of an Hour”, Mrs. Mallard, the main character is shocked at the news that her husband had apparently died. Throughout the story it is revealed that Mrs. Mallard takes the news of her husband’s apparent death in...
When a storm hits, it strikes with a sudden climax, and fades away into oblivion. In The Storm, a short story by Kate Chopin, an adulterous affair occurs during a rainstorm between Calixta, mother to Bibi and wife to Bobinot, and Alcee, husband to Clarisse....
Literary criticism is the comparison, analysis, interpretation, and/or evaluation of works of literature. Literary criticism is essentially an opinion, supported by evidence, relating to theme, style, setting or historical or political context.
History
The Western critical tradition began with Plato’s Republic (4th century BCE). A generation later, Aristotle, in his Poetics, developed a set of principles of composition that had a lasting influence. European criticism since the Renaissance has primarily focused on the moral worth of literature and the nature of its relationship to reality. The volume of literary criticism increased greatly in the 20th century, and its later years saw a radical reappraisal of traditional critical modes and the development of a multiplicity of critical factions.
Key Figures
Plato, Aristotle, Sir Philip Sidney, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, etc.
Types
Types of literary criticism may be based on a variety of critical approaches or movements, e.g. archetypal criticism, cultural criticism, feminist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist Criticism, New Criticism (formalism/structuralism), New Historicism, post-structuralism, and reader-response criticism.
References
1. Richards, I. A. (2017). Principles of literary criticism. Routledge. (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781351223508/principles-literary-criticism-richards)
2. Showalter, E. (1975). Literary criticism. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1(2), 435-460. (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493231?journalCode=signs)
3. Gutzwiller, K. J. (2010). Literary criticism. A Companion to Hellenistic Literature, 337-365. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118970577.ch23)
4. Gallagher, C. (1997). The history of literary criticism. Daedalus, 126(1), 133-153. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027412)
5. Verdenius, W. J. (1983). The principles of Greek literary criticism. Mnemosyne, 36(1-2), 14-59. (https://brill.com/view/journals/mnem/36/1-2/article-p14_3.xml)
6. Agapitos, P. A. (2008). Literary criticism. (https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/29470/chapter-abstract/247162477?redirectedFrom=fulltext)
7. Wilder, L. (2005). “The rhetoric of literary criticism” revisited: Mistaken critics, complex contexts, and social justice. Written Communication, 22(1), 76-119. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0741088304272751)
8. Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (1994). Children's literature: Criticism and the fictional child. Clarendon Press. (https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/73797/)
Sort & filter
