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Founded in 1951, by F. W. Bateson, Essays in Criticism soon achieved world-wide circulation, and is today regarded as one of Britain's most distinguished journals of literary criticism …

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The f.w. bateson memorial lecture 2019.

Professor Dinah Birch CBE (University of Liverpool) delivered the 2019 Bateson Lecture on 'Utopian Topics: Ruskin & Oxford' in the MBI Al Jaber Building, Corpus Christi College, Oxford on Wednesday 13 February.

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Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism is a BYU-run journal that provides an avenue for undergraduate students to publish their work in a professional setting. We seek out the best essays on a variety of texts from a variety of perspectives, encouraging communication and scholarship amongst the student body.

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Literary Criticism for Students (and anyone else)

Getting started, research strategies, online encyclopedias, literary criticism databases, author biography, defining terms and concepts.

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What is Literary Criticism?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, literary criticism is "The art or practice of judging and commenting on the qualities and character of a literary work; consideration or analysis of a text in relation to language, structure, biography, history, etc., or (in later use, freq. with modifying word) by a particular philosophical, political, or linguistic method; (also) an instance of this, esp. in a written form; a school or method of criticizing literature.

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• Use the literary criticism databases on this page to explore your topic further. This will help to determine whether there is sufficient material to support your thesis or perhaps lead you in a different direction.   Note: Both Artemis and Literature Criticism Online have a feature called Topic Finder which can be useful in suggesting new topics connected to your original search. Watch the tutorial . Note: Literature Resource Center also has a translate feature.
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• Literary Sources This link opens in a new window An integrated search for Literature Criticism Online, Literature Resource Center, and Modern Language Association (MLA) International Bibliography.
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guide to literary theory and criticism

A comprehensive resource for close reading, deeper understanding, and analytical discussion.

Literature is meant to convey meaning, but understanding the message of a novel, play, or poem can take some digging. If you have the right tools, you can gain a deep understanding of the texts you read — and approach literature’s most intimidating topics with confidence. This article presents a host of background information and useful resources to help you make use of a reader’s most essential tools: literary theory and literary criticism.

Sigmund Freud is often credited, rightly or wrongly, with the assertion that “[s]ometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But what if the cigar in the novel you just read is not, in fact, just a cigar, but a symbol of oppression or suppressed desire or even jealousy? The narratives, settings, and characters of literature can and often do represent more than what at first meets the eye. Literary theory and criticism can shine a light on those underlying meanings to help you: 

• Understand the themes , symbols , and motifs presented in a text.
• Analyze an author’s style .
• Write a critical essay or analysis of a book.
• Engage in a comprehensive literary discussion .
• Teach students to ask analytical questions of a text.

What Is Literary Theory? What Is Literary Criticism?

Literary theory is a way of interpreting a work of art. When readers and scholars engage in literary criticism, which is the practice of evaluating literature, they often use literary theories to inform their ideas and opinions about a text. 

Though the terms “literary criticism” and “literary theory” are related, they are not interchangeable. Some scholars like to think of literary theories as eyeglasses or camera lenses through which they can examine and evaluate works of literature or other pieces of art. Then, what they see through each lens (each theory) becomes the focus of their literary criticism. Literary criticism is a research method or a kind of scholarly discourse that engages with literary theory .

For example, just as a bifocal or a tinted lens will reveal certain qualities of a work of art, so can different literary theories. A work of feminist literary criticism will contain observations about a text that reveal what it’s like to be female. Writers of feminist criticism will likely employ feminist literary theory to support their scholarly arguments. An argument based on the same text examined through a lens of Marxist theory, however, might focus more on how the text regards a particular social class.

Many different literary theories exist, and scholars often blend two or more theories into their interpretations of literary texts. As time passes, new theories that reflect contemporary issues and mindsets emerge, adding richness and nuance to the study of literature.

Learning resources: 

• Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism : In this resource, find helpful examples of different schools of literary thought.
• The 10 Best Literary Theory and Criticism Books : Peruse this list of book titles that describe and explain different literary theories in detail. 
• Literary Schools of Theory : Here are some thorough explanations of individual literary theories. 
• Literary Criticism definition : This page includes examples of literary criticism ideas.
• What is literary criticism, and why would anyone want to write or read it? Read a University of Toronto professor’s discussion of the role of literary criticism in the appreciation of literature.
• What Is the Point of Literary Criticism? Still wondering about the point of literary criticism? Check out this article for more information.

The History of Literary Theory

The origins of literary theory go back to Plato and Aristotle and the roots of philosophy. To Plato, literature is divinely inspired, but it is written by humans and, therefore, not a trustworthy source of truth. For this reason, Plato’s ideal society excludes poets to ensure that knowledge-seekers are not confused by poetry and other forms of literature. Many scholars credit Aristotle’s defense of the poetic modes that Plato decried as the foundation of modern literary theory. 

Much later, in the 19th century, other European thinkers expanded on these ancient ideas. For example, the Romanticism movement in Germany and England celebrated the same divine qualities of poets that worried Plato, placing high value on the potential of literature to reveal truth. 

The literary theorists of the 20th century have certainly followed suit. Contemporary thinkers continue to demonstrate to students and scholars alike that literature has the power to illuminate what it is to be human in the context of the societies in which we all live.

• A History of Literary Criticism : This podcast explores the Platonic and Aristotelian origins of literary theory.
• Historical Development of Literary Criticism : The origins of literary theory explain how contemporary literary theory is indebted the greatest minds of antiquity. 
• The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism : These volumes, organized by historical era, offer in-depth explanations of the development of literary theory.
• How Reading Makes Us More Human : This article surveys a series of arguments about the benefits of “deep reading” literature.

Literary Theory Examples

In addition to feminist and Marxist literary theories already mentioned, there are many literary theories — or lenses — through which one can interpret a work of literature. Here are several examples of the most prevalent schools of thought as well as a brief description of each. 

• Structuralist Theory gained notoriety in the 1920s. Since then, it has been widely accepted as one of the more complicated literary theories in existence. In a nutshell, structuralists look at how language and linguistics operate as a kind of written or oral code. Just as language and music contain patterns, so does literature; literary patterns are sometimes revealed in a writer’s use of myths and archetypes, symbols, or even genre.
• Psychoanalytic Theory originates from the work of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Theory as a literary theory emerged in the 1930s. It examines the role of the psyche and the unconscious in individuals and literary characters as they interpret the impact of society and culture on themselves and others.
• The origins of Marxist Theory are credited to German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883), who believed that people are the product of the economic and social environments in which they grow up. Since the 1930s, Marxists have been studying the tensions between social classes as they appear in literature and elsewhere. In addition to economic concerns, Marxists also examine how a text uses politics to uphold or challenge social norms. 
• Feminist Theory emerged in the 1960s, and the interests of feminist scholars, like the various definitions of feminism itself, do not always overlap. One overarching concern does unite all feminists, however: the power dynamics that stem from stereotypes and discriminatory practices involving women. 
• Since the 1970s, Critical Race Theory and African American Literary Theory has enabled scholars in America to investigate the impact of race and racism as observed in various forms of expression. African American Studies as well as Asian American, Latino and Indian Studies are all closely linked to this literary theory — as well as matters of social activism, civil and human rights, and cultural perceptions of race and stereotypes. 
• New Historicism emerged in the 1980s. To New Historicists, literature reveals the writer’s interpretation of historical events rather than the actual facts of the events. Cultural studies examine the role of culture in literature, both from the writer’s point of view and from that of the characters in the text.
• Gender Studies and Queer Theory came about in the 1990s. Scholars of this school develop their ideas about literature while thinking about gender and sexuality. Feminist Theory is often linked with Gender Studies and Queer Theory because all three schools of thought concern power and marginalized populations.
• Postcolonial Studies emerged in the 1990s to illuminate literature by writers representing both Western colonizers and the colonized. Issues as varied as politics, religion, culture and economics all matter within the context of power, and these issues form the basis of Postcolonial Studies.

Key Figures in Literary Theory

Hundreds of thinkers and scholars have contributed to the development of literary theory, and they continue to stimulate new ideas regarding art, writing and culture. Here is a brief introduction to ten key figures every literary scholar should know.

• Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797): English writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft was an early proponent of women’s rights. In her seminal text A Vindication of the Rights of Women , published in 1792, Wollstonecraft argues that women are not subordinate to men and that feminine conventions are highly oppressive to women. Wollstonecraft is credited by many contemporary feminists as laying the groundwork for the feminist movement.
• Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986): French feminist, existentialist and social theorist Simone de Beauvoir was the first to articulate the distinction between one’s sex, a matter of biology, and one’s gender, a matter of myriad social constructs and stereotypes. Many literary theorists regard de Beauvoir’s philosophical writings as fundamental to our contemporary understanding of gender roles in society.
• Judith Butler (1956- ): The writings of American professor, philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler appear on many a queer theory reading list around the world. According to Butler, gender identities have a lot to do with how individuals repetitively “perform” their gender according to dominant expectations, stereotypes and conventions of gender. 
• bell hooks (1952- ): Gloria Jean Watkins uses this pen name to honor her great-grandmother and to draw attention away from her name and identity and towards her ideas. As an American professor and feminist activist, hooks has written about art, media, gender, race and class. Her contributions to literary theory are appreciated within the contexts of several different literary schools of thought.
• Roland Barthes (1915-1980): French literary theorist Roland Barthes was primarily concerned with the potential of signs to carry meaning. His complex ideas around communication, language, and cultural phenomena impacted the development of Structuralism and semiotics as literary theories. 
• Noam Chomsky ( 1928- ): American theoretical linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky is widely regarded as a true polymath, having contributed to the study of mathematics, psychology, analytic philosophy and other fields. In the context of literary theory, Chomsky is best known for his ideas around linguistics and psycholinguistics. 
• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis. His psychoanalytic theory of personality, which involves the id, the ego and the superego, can be applied to people and characters, revealing Freud’s ideas surrounding their motivations and their reactions to the world around them.
• W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963): American poet, sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois is famous for his scholarly works that argued for the equal treatment of Black people in a world that regarded Black people as inferior. As a professor of sociology, economics and history, he often applied Marxist theory to his interpretation of American history.
• Karl Marx (1818-1883): German historian, economist and sociologist Karl Marx co-authored, with Friedrich Engels, several texts that provided a foundation for the political movements of socialism and communism. Marx’s humanism and his concern for the plight of the lower classes inspired the revolutionary ideas for which he is well known.
• Edward Said (1935-2003): Palestinian-American professor Edward Said is a founder of the field of Postcolonial Studies. He was the first to point out the European tendency to represent Asians unfairly in literature and art in order to assert the power of the West over the East; this tendency results in damaging stereotypes that characterize the people of the East as inferior to Westerners.

How to Choose A Literary Theory

Choosing which literary theory — or theories — to use to inform your close reading depends on the questions you’re pondering. You don’t have to choose just one. In her seminal work, Critical Theory Today , Lois Tyson uses a florist’s bins of flowers as a metaphor to explain the relationship between different literary theories; for Tyson, just as each bin holds a different kind of flower, each literary theory offers readers a different way to understand — or “see” — a text. Just as different types of flowers can combine to make striking bouquets that are more beautiful in combination than on their own, literary theories can overlap to create a deeper appreciation and richer understanding of the elements at work in a piece of literature. 

So what are you trying to get out of the works you’re studying? Perhaps you want to dispel confusions about a text, form a clearer opinion about the author’s intent, or figure out why your reading of a narrative is so different from someone else’s. Once you understand the type of questions you want to ask about a work of literature, you are ready to locate the literary theories that will best inform your process.

Learning resources:

• Literary Theories: Analysis Questions : The University of Texas - Arlington Libraries offers a great list of analysis questions for various types of literary theory to help you see the kinds of questions you can ask about a text that will take your understanding to the next level.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Literary Theory : The IEP, hosted by the University of Tennessee at Martin, compares several popular schools of literary theory and provides various resources for further reading.
• Finding a Literary Criticism Approach : This guide from Pellissippi State Community College Libraries offers step-by-step tips to writers of critical essays.
• Finding Books with Literary Criticism : The University of Illinois at Chicago offers this resource to library-goers in search of books and articles about literary criticism. This article also contains helpful advice to users of databases like JSTOR and ProjectMuse.

Examples of Applying Literary Theory

Let’s see literary theory in action. Here are three examples that illustrate how applying a literary theory can enable close reading, dispel confusion, and help you deepen your understanding of a text. See below for further examples of how literary theory can be applied — and not just to works of literature.

1. Marxist reading of The Great Gatsby : In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , Nick feels a keen sense of discomfort when he attends one of Jay Gatsby’s lavish parties. To find out why, we apply a literary theory: A Marxist reading of Nick’s awkwardness offers scholars deeper insight into the scene, Nick’s character, and the character of Jay Gatsby himself. Nick’s social class sets him apart from Gatsby and his affluent guests, making Nick an outsider to the decadence of Gatsby’s world. A Marxist understanding of Nick’s role in the novel enhances the irony of the revelation that Gatsby is pretending to be someone he is not: In reality, he is the son of poor farmers, which means he has more in common with Nick than with his own party guests.

2. African American Literary Theory in To Kill a Mockingbird : In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird , Tom Robinson is a Black man whose arm was injured when he was a 12-year-old child; Tom’s left arm was caught in a cotton gin, leaving him disabled. What might the author’s purpose have been in giving Tom an injury of this nature? A scholarly interpretation of Tom’s disabled arm within the context of African American studies reveals that Tom’s injury is a symbol for his race. As a Black man in Alabama during the Great Depression, Tom is highly vulnerable; his disability compromises his ability to work just as his race compromises his ability to survive his trial after he is accused of sexually assaulting a White woman. The symbolism of Tom’s injured arm reveals the extent to which racism has the potential to harm and kill innocent men. 

3. Structuralism and Mythology: In mythology, the food of gods and goddesses takes the form of ambrosia and nectar; these food items are vastly different to the food of humans. A literary theory can help us understand why this difference exists and what it represents. A Structuralist reading of the different foods consumed by gods and humans illuminates a pattern of behavior that exists in all Greek myths. Food distinguishes humans from gods; only humans eat olives and drink wine, while gods consume ambrosia, nectar and the smoke of sacrificed offerings. A Structuralist examination of mythological eating patterns provides scholars with insight into the overarching myth system of ancient Greece and Rome.

Here are some further examples of literary theory in action — applied in some unexpected ways:

• A Marxist take on Cinderella
• A Feminist take on Disney Princesses
• A Postcolonial take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest
• A Psychoanalytic take on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper

Putting Literary Theory Into Practice

When you’re ready to perform a close read on a text, it’s wise to read with a pen or highlighter in hand. Mark the passages you believe to have analytical potential — even if you’re not yet sure why they are meaningful. Then, review these passages, looking for patterns that help you see where to apply literary theory and begin developing your own literary criticism. Ask questions such as:

• Do any symbols or motifs repeat themselves? 
• How do the themes of the work interact with the literary theories you selected? 
• Over the course of the work of literature, do any of the characters develop according to the predictions of the literary theories that most interest you? 

Sample Practice: A Postcolonial reading of Wide Sargasso Sea

To help you understand how patterns in a literary text can reveal meaning, here’s one more example: a Postcolonial reading of English writer Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea . This 1966 novel centers on a young heiress, Antoinette Cosway, born and raised on the Caribbean island of Martinique in the 1830s. Rhys based her character on Bertha Rochester from Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 classic novel Jane Eyre and tells the story of how she met and married Rochester, before she became the so-called “madwoman in the attic.”

In these three passages from Part 2 of the novel, Rochester has come to Martinique to marry Antoinette with the intention of exploiting her wealth:

So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse. There we were, sheltered from the heavy rain under a large mango tree, myself, my wife Antoinette and a little half-caste servant who was called Amélie. Under a neighbouring tree I could see our luggage covered with sacking, the two porters and a boy holding fresh horses, hired to carry us up 2,000 feet to the waiting honeymoon house.

The girl Amélie said this morning, ‘I hope you will be very happy, sir, in your sweet honeymoon house.’ She was laughing at me I could see. A lovely little creature but sly, spiteful, malignant perhaps, like much else in this place. (Part 2, Page 55)

Analysis 1: 

In this passage, Rochester reveals that he is suspicious of Amélie, who represents the island of Martinique as a whole. His descriptions of her contain a pattern: She is “little” and “half-caste,” which emphasizes her inferior position as a servant and as a person of Caribbean heritage. Amélie’s position enhances his resentment of her as he suspects her of mocking him; Rochester is sure that she is showing disrespect, which is more offensive for the fact that she is a servant and a West Indian. Rochester’s mistrust of Amélie is further demonstrated by both his use of harshly critical adjectives to describe her and his direct comparison of Amélie to the island on which he finds himself. From a Postcolonial perspective, Rochester, as an Englishman, represents the colonial power of Europe over the French colonies of the West Indies. His sense of superiority and dismissal of Amélie reflects widespread European attitudes towards colonized lands and their peoples. His sexual attraction to her, however, as evidenced by his use of the word “lovely,” complicates matters; as a European man, he may have legal power over the Martinican Amélie, but the sexual power of her beauty places him in a weaker position.

Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger. Her pleading expression annoys me. I have not bought her, she has bought me, or so she thinks. (Part 2, Page 59)

Analysis 2:

Rochester’s weary tone while describing the landscape of Martinique illustrates his acute discomfort while away from his own city and culture. The repetitive nature of his complaints form a pattern in this passage. The many colors of the island and the natural features of the land offend him and exacerbate his irritation with his wife, who was born and raised in this bright and colorful world. From a Postcolonial perspective, Rochester’s weariness indicates that he feels a sense of impatience with the land and its products, which he finds are garish and inferior to those of his own country. Rochester’s description of his wife as a “stranger” suggests that her origins and her person are too different from his own to be worthy of his trust and acceptance.

There were trailing pink flowers on the table and the name echoed pleasantly in my head. Coralita Coralita. The food, though too highly seasoned, was lighter and more appetizing than anything I had tasted in Jamaica. We drank champagne. A great many moths and beetles found their way into the room, flew into the candles and fell dead on the tablecloth. Amélie swept them up with a crumb brush. Uselessly. More moths and beetles came. (Part 2, Page 67)

Analysis 3: 

At dinner, Rochester drinks champagne, and under the influence of alcohol, he is able to appreciate the beauty of the pink coralita flowers on the dinner table. The brightness of the pink color is as noticeable to the reader as the dead moths and beetles that also appear on the table in a contrasting pattern of color and darkness. The insects are drawn to the light of the candles, and their deaths take place near the life-giving plates of food Rochester and Antoinette eat for dinner. A Postcolonial reading of this scene reveals that the stillness of the insects, which have all died, and the stillness of the flowers, which were plucked from a living climbing vine, suggest the potential of Europe to overpower the people of their colonies. The presence of nature on the surface of the dinner table, however, suggests that the natural world of Martinique, represented by the flowers and the insects, cannot be completely eradicated by a European presence, which is symbolized by the champagne and candles.  

As you can see, putting literary theory into practice is easier than its lofty origins might suggest. After all, literary critics and scholars all use the same tools you now have to put literary theory into practice. After you select one or two theories to review, remember that you can add more theories to your study of literature as you learn more about your ideas and your interpretation of the text becomes more informed. Soon, you’ll be engaging with literary theory and criticism and contributing to literary scholarship with confidence.

• How to Write Literary Analysis : Learn how to analyze literature with this brief guide from SparkNotes. Literary analysis is an essential step to writing literary criticism.
• How to Identify Writing Patterns : This video from the Online Reading Lab at Excelsior College describes how to identify the structure, parts and organization of a work of literature in order to think analytically about a text.
• Steps to Literary Criticism : Follow this process to outline your own literary criticism. 
• Beginner's Guide to Literary Analysis : Learn the basics of literary analysis, including how to write such analysis.

Literary Theory Book List

If you’d like to learn more about this approach to literary analysis and deep reading, here is a book list to whet your appetite and deepen your understanding:

• Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature With Critical Theory by Steven Lynn
• Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton 
• Orientalism by Edward Said 
• African American Literary Theory: A Reader edited by Winston Napier
• Aristotle’s Poetics  
• S/Z by Roland Barthes
• The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime by Neil Hertz
• Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory by Terry Eagleton
• “Race,” Writing, and Difference edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah
• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
• Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’O

Literature Studies: Literary Criticism

• Journals & Articles
• Literary Criticism
• Short Stories
• Evaluating & Citing
• MLA Citations

Getting Started

Literary Criticism is the term for writing that studies, evaluates, discusses, and interprets works of literature. Criticism may also indicate a theoretical approach to interpreting the work, such as new criticism, deconstruction, new historicism, queer theory, reader response or structuralism.

Researching literary criticism may require finding information on a specific theory, in which case encyclopedias or dictionaries of literary terms may be helpful starting points. For a literary critique of a work, scholarly articles and book chapters are more appropriate than general web sources. Try searching databases and the library catalog using keywords such as the name of the theory or the name of a literary work.

Databases for Literary Criticism

• MLA International Bibliography MLA is the most complete and important source of citations to journal articles, book chapters and books covering all topics in literature and literary criticism in all languages. Use it to research specific authors, works, and literary theory, as well as film, theater and performance. Because MLA is in the familiar EBSCO interface, it can be searched alongside other useful databases like Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text and Humanities International Complete .
• Literary Reference Center Plus (EBSCO) LRC Plus is an EBSCO database that is similar to Literature Resource Center (above). It contains detailed information on the most-studied authors and their works, including plot summaries, literary criticism, authors' biographies, articles from literary journals, and book reviews. It is a good place to look for information after using MLA and Literature Resource Center.
• JSTOR JSTOR contains over a thousand full-text scholarly journals covering all subjects in the humanities, sciences and social sciences, and is one of our most popular databases for humanities topics, including literature. This database searches the full text of its holdings for search terms, so some results will be off-topic - it's good to use the limiters to narrow searches down. Due to its focus on storage, JSTOR contains older volumes of journals, generally at least 3 to 5 years old.
• Project MUSE - Standard Collection Contains the full text of over 400 high-quality journals from scholarly publishers in the arts, social sciences, and humanities, including literature, linguistics, music, philosophy and religion. Project MUSE is especially strong for topics related to theater.

Reference Books

Selected Literary Criticism reference books available on the first floor of Jerome Library.

Selected journals for literature & criticism

Do You Know Masterplots?

The Masterplots Series contain concise plot synopses, critical commentary, character profiles, literary settings and biographical profiles. Masterplots articles provide referential information about sources, and discussion of significant aspects of the work’s artistry and history. A  bibliography provides annotated citations to the best English-language sources for further research about the book.

Shorter than Cliff Notes, Masterplots are an excellent starting point to refresh one’s memory about a previously read book or a life of a previously studied author, and the guide for students needing to review a term’s worth of literary study.

Reference E-books

• Oxford Digital Reference Shelf Full-text reference works from Oxford University Press covering a broad range of subjects, and including timelines, quotations, and overviews.
• Oxford Research Encyclopedias Full-text encyclopedias on a range of topics that include in-depth, peer-reviewed summaries written by scholars across all fields of study.
• OhioLINK Electronic Book Center (EBC) The EBC Scholarly & Reference Collection contains over 60,000 books published by ABC-CLIO, Gale, Oxford University Press, Sage and Springer. They cover all subjects and include encyclopedias, dictionaries and handbooks.

Selected Websites

• Modern American Poetry Site (MAPS) A scholarly, comprehensive site created by the Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, filled with commentary and criticism on many poems and poets.
• Web del Sol Compiles literature and literary journals online.
• NINES: 19th Century Scholarship Online An organization dedicated to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first. Includes tools and digital workspace.
• SparkNotes Free online study guides providing context, themes and motifs, overviews and chapter summaries for major works.
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102 Indispensible Works of Literary Criticism

A highly subjective and idiosyncratic list created upon moving house.

Having recently moved into a new apartment, I have been presented with one of the great toils, but also great joys, of relocation: moving all my goddamn books. It’s a chore, to be certain, one so notoriously laborious it leads many bibliophiles to shed large portions of their libraries in the interest of avoiding the worst of it. But screw that, I say! I will cart these stupid things with me every place I live, and what’s more, my labor continually increases, as I now receive books in the mail on a daily basis from publishers, editors and even the writers themselves, and I still purchase books (mostly used, which pretty much translates to bulk ). But I don’t care. The weight is worth the lifting.

But even for those who loathe the process of moving a library, once the boxes are firmly stacked in the new digs, you get to create a whole new one, and this is the great joy I referred to. Most literary types acquire so many new books that whatever system they’d installed in their old place inevitably breaks down and becomes overrun with precarious stacks of the dreaded unshelved. In a new home, though, we get to start afresh, create a new system. It can be tedious and tempestuous but it’s ultimately cathartic. At least for me, I mean, shit, I don’t know you.

Anyway, so I spent my Superbowl Sunday organizing the most important section of any critic’s collection: literary criticism and biography. Not only is this my favorite shit to read, but I also refer to them so often that they’re also the most practically necessary. After I finished, I posted a photo of the beautifully and temporarily full shelves (I’ve already pulled like six books off that I’m using for current pieces) on Twitter, and someone asked me if I had any particular favorites. I wasn’t at home when I got the tweet, so to even consider responding at the time was unthinkable. I pondered for a few seconds  before immediately becoming overwhelmed. When I returned later and stared at the shelves, it occurred to me that I’ve been asked this question quite a few times. Perhaps this is because as a self-identifying literary critic there isn’t much else for people to ask me—this field doesn’t exactly make for the most riveting party talk. But whatever the reason, I thought I’d put together a list of the criticism that I most admire and to which I repeatedly refer. This is, of course, an extremely limited list, taken exclusively from books I own. Also for the sake of my sanity, I excluded all single-subject biographies and criticism on film or music; only fiction, poetry, and drama. Memoirs counted only if they directly involve other writers and/or the literary landscape of the era. It is in no way meant to be a list of the world’s indispensible literary criticism, only my own, and only so far.

So to that guy on Twitter, and to those who’ve asked me before, here is my belated reply.

(NB: list is in alphabetical order by author, or subject for biographies, except for two anthologies at the start of the list, which are alphabetical by title.)

(also NB: this shit was hard . I initially wanted to do 50 but my first list stretched to nearly 175 titles. These 102 are, believe it or not, a compromise.)

102 Indispensible Volumes of Literary Criticism

A New Literary History of America , ed. Greil Marcus & Werner Sollors

The Paris Review Interviews, Vols. 1—4 , ed. Philip Gourevitch

White Girls , Hilton Als

Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983—2005 , Margaret Atwood

Notes of a Native Son , James Baldwin

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung , Lester Bangs, ed. Greil Marcus

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them , Elif Batuman

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections , Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn

Selected Non-Fictions , Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Eliot Weinberger

Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998—2003 , Roberto Boláno, ed. Ignacio Echevarría, trans. Natasha Wimmer

Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America , Christopher Bram

Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir , Anatole Broyard

Passions of the Mind: Selected Essays , A.S. Byatt

Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote , Truman Capote

Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands , Michael Chabon

Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000—2005 , J.M. Coetzee

Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979—1989 , Stanley Crouch

The Lifespan of a Fact , John D’Agata & Jim Fingal

The White Album , Joan Didion

Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education: Essays on Great Writers and Their Books , Michael Dirda

Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993—2006 , E.L. Doctorow

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews , Geoff Dyer

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, Geoff Dyer

Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others , Terry Eagleton

Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives , Joseph Epstein

How to Be Alone: Essays, Jonathan Franzen

How to Read a Novelist , John Freeman

Finding a Form: Essays , William H. Gass

The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism , Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Bad Feminist: Essays , Roxane Gay

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern , Stephen Greenblatt

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare , Stephen Greenblatt

Scoundrel Time , Lillian Hellman

Arguably: Essays , Christopher Hitchens

Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere , Christopher Hitchens

Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade of Soaking in Great Books , Nick Hornby

Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays, 1968—2002 , Clive James

No Other Book: Selected Essays , Randall Jarrell, Brad Leithauser, editor

Selected Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler , Samuel Johnson, W.J. Bate, editor

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft , Stephen King

Small Wonder: Essays, Barbara Kingsolver

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination , Ursula K. Le Guin

Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958—2008 , John Leonard

The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc. , Jonathan Lethem

Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books , Wendy Lesser

Time Bites: Views and Reviews , Doris Lessing

About Burt Britton, John Cheever, Gordon Lish, William Saroyan, Isaac B. Singer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Other Matters , Morris Lurie

Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays , Norman Mailer

Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers , Janet Malcolm

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice , Janet Malcolm

The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews , William Maxwell

Ideas and the Novel , Mary McCarthy

What We See When We Read , Peter Mendelsund

Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944-2000 , Arthur Miller

Sexual Politics , Kate Millett

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination , Toni Morrison

Lectures on Literature , Vladimir Nabokov

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books , Azar Nafisi

(Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities , Joyce Carol Oates

Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose , Joyce Carol Oates

Mystery and Manner: Occasional Prose , Flannery O’Connor

A Collection of Essays , George Orwell

The Portable Dorothy Parker , Dorothy Parker, ed. Marion Meade

Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books , Tim Parks

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21 st Century , Stephen Pinker

Under Review: Further Writings on Writers, 1946-1990 , Anthony Powell

The Tale Bearers , V.S. Pritchett

Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them , Francine Prose

Citizen: An American Lyric , Claudia Rankine

In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays , Katie Roiphe

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books , Claudia Roth Pierpont

Reading Myself and Others , Philip Roth

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991 , Salman Rushdie

Joseph Anton: A Memoir , Salman Rushdie

“What Is Literature?” and Other Essays , Jean-Paul Sartre

The Braindead Megaphone: Essays , George Saunders

The Novel: A Biography , Michael Schmidt

Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life , Dani Shapiro

A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx , Elaine Showalter

13 Ways of Looking at the Novel , Jane Smiley

Artful , Ali Smith

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays , Zadie Smith

Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit

Against Interpretation: And Other Essays , Susan Sontag

Regarding the Pain of Others , Susan Sontag

Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives , John Sutherland

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony , Lewis Thomas

What Would Lynne Tillman Do? , Lynne Tillman

New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families , Colm Tóibín

The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965—75 , Lionel Trilling

Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism , John Updike

More Matter: Essays and Criticism , John Updike

The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry , Helen Vendler

Both Flesh and Not: Essays , David Foster Wallace

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays , David Foster Wallace

The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews , Eudora Welty

The Essential Ellen Willis , Ellen Willis, Nona Willis Aronowitz, editor

Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 , Edmund Wilson

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe

How Fiction Works , James Wood

A Room of One’s Own , Virginia Woolf

The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All , C.D. Wright

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Module 10: Working with Literature

Terms and concepts in literary criticism, learning objectives.

Identify key terms and concepts of literary criticism

Up front, the thing to bear in mind is that literary criticism has a habit of taking everyday words and using them in very specific and sometimes counterintuitive ways. Consider the following title of an article, published in an academic literary journal, about Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved: “‘To Be Loved and Cry Shame’: A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’” You’re already familiar with the word “reading,” of course, but you may be less familiar with the way it’s used here: as a noun. Instead of an act you perform, like reading a book, the word “reading” here refers to something the author of the article has created through her critical-interpretive work: a reading. And even more, it’s a psychological reading. Clearly, the word “reading” is being used in a highly specific way.

Or consider another everyday word: “unpack.” You can tell someone that you need to unpack your suitcase or your car, and they’ll instantly understand what you mean. But look at the following passage from another academic article, this one titled “Reading to Outmaneuver: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and African American Literacy in Cold War America,” and notice the word’s use in a different way:

In their texts, African American authors explore a range of positions on reading’s role in black communities. Some works, such as James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), depict reading as the route to transcending the limitations of one’s status—albeit one that comes at great cost. Others texts, in a variation on the Douglass theme, depict it as a radical awakening—for instance, Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968). Still others represent literacy as a weapon wielded by dominant powers to control, exclude, or erase blackness; Toni Morrison takes this tack in her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), and again in a later work, Song of Solomon (1977). As they work to unpack the complex history and role of literacy in African American lives, these twentieth-century writers rely on books to construct themselves as individuals, community members, and citizens. (Matthews)

The author obviously isn’t talking about unpacking a physical object like a suitcase. From the context, you can probably tell that she’s using the word to refer to the interpretive act of explaining something—in this case, “the complex history and role of literacy in African American lives”—by drawing out implicit or unexamined meanings.

The upshot is that when you first begin to read literary criticism, you should be on the alert for regular words that seem odd in a sentence, as this may be a sign that they’re being used in a technical way. You’ll also encounter many words that are entirely new to you; the field has its own highly developed technical vocabulary. When you encounter such words, try to use context clues to understand their meaning, but also make good use of the many valuable resources that are available for this very purpose, such as this online glossary or the books that are recognized as standard reference works, such as The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory or Holman and Harmon’s renowned A Handbook to Literature .

Common Terms in Literary Criticism

With these things in mind, here’s a short glossary of some broadly common terms you’ll encounter in literary criticism.

The first word to understand is “criticism” itself, which can be confusing if you take it in the wrong sense, which also happens to be its more customary, everyday sense. In everyday conversation, to criticize most often means to find fault with someone or something. The Oxford English Dictionary captures this sense when it defines criticism as “the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes.” However, the OED also provides a second definition, and this is the one we’re concerned with here: criticism is “the analysis and judgment of the merits and faults of a literary or artistic work.” The roles of “film critic” and “book critic” both draw on this definition, as they refer to people whose job is not so much to find fault with films and books as to offer informed evaluations of their quality.

Putting this all together, you can see that “literary criticism” means literary analysis and interpretation. It’s the act of interpreting and evaluating literature to understand and appreciate it more deeply. Note that this definition also applies to different forms of the word “criticism,” such as “critical.” Your “critical judgment” about a story or poem doesn’t mean your expression of dislike or disapproval but your overall evaluation and “take” on it as a work of literature. (On this last point, see the comments about “Reading” above, and also below.)

The OED defines a theory as “a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something.” You’re probably familiar with the word’s use in the natural sciences, where a theory—such as the theory of evolution, the the theory of relativity, or cell theory—is an explanatory framework, supported and verified by repeated scientific testing, that accounts for a set of observed facts or phenomena in the physical world.

The word’s use in connection with literature and literary criticism is related but distinct. Literary criticism proceeds by drawing on literary theory, defined as the set of methods, ideas, and assumptions that we bring to the reading of literature. There’s a highly developed realm of academic research and discourse devoted to literary theory. It gets really deep, really fast, and its many details sprawl well beyond the boundaries of this course. Just know that when you start reading literary criticism, you may come across references to theory. You can keep the two terms (criticism and theory) straight by remembering that literary criticism is the act of interpreting and evaluating literary texts, while literary theory deals with the assumptions and principles we bring to that practice. Sometimes the different approaches to literary criticism are referred to as discrete theories in their own right. That’s how we’ll refer to them in the next section on approaches to literary criticism.

Sometimes different literary critical theories are referred to as different “schools,” such as the “reader-response school” or the “feminist school of thought” (both of which you’ll learn about in the next section). This employs one of the basic definitions of the word “school”: as “a group of people, particularly writers, artists, or philosophers, sharing the same or similar ideas, methods, or style.”

As noted in the example above, in literary criticism and theory the word “reading” is often used not as a verb (“She was reading a book”) but as a noun (“What was her reading of that book?”) to refer to a particular interpretation, viewpoint, or understanding of a literary work. English professor Dr. Stephen Watt explains the difference: “‘Reading’ is one of the most provocative terms in literary theory, in part because it connotes both an activity and a product: on the one hand, an effort to comprehend a text or object of knowledge, and on the other, a more formal response.” Watts says the latter sense of the word refers to “an intellectual or scholarly product.” This second sense is important to understand when approaching the realm of literary criticism, because the act of literary criticism results in “a reading” of a literary work, that is, a particular “take” on it. When you set out to apply literary criticism to a story, novel, poem, or play, the end product is your personal reading of the work, your individual “intellectual or scholarly product,” which you produce by engaging with the work and attempting to articulate your interpretive understanding of it.

The word “canon” refers to a collection of literary works that are held to be of extremely high quality and permanent value for a culture or civilization. The now-unfashionable idea of “the classics” is roughly equivalent. Originally used to refer to an official collection of religious texts that are held by some to be authoritative and sacred, such as the canon of 27 books that make up the New Testament, the word also came to be applied to works of literature in general as a broad conceptual tool for identifying those that constitute a kind of core collection of literary value for a given civilization—something along the lines of what the 19th-century English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold meant in his essay “Culture and Anarchy” when he famously referred to “the best that has been thought and said.”

The very idea of a literary canon invites controversy, as it automatically raises the question of who is qualified or authorized to identify the works that should be universally considered canonical. The great cultural upheavals in America, Great Britain, and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s involved accusations of racism and sexism being leveled against official institutional notions of the literary canon at schools, colleges, and universities, and in the early decades of the 21st century the idea of a universal or normative canon remained contentious. This is why you’re as likely as not to come across explicit mention of the literary canon, and of the controversies surrounding the idea, in works of criticism written at any time during the past several decades.

Koolish, Lynda. “‘To Be Loved and Cry Shame’: A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’” MELUS, vol. 26, no. 4, 2001, pp. 169–195. JSTOR,  www.jstor.org/stable/3185546 . Accessed 22 Apr. 2021.

Matthews, Kristin L. “Reading to Outmaneuver: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and African American Literacy in Cold War America.” Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature, University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 53–79. (Quote comes from pp. 54-55.)

Watt, Stephen. “Reading.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 30 June 2020,  https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1038 . Accessed 19 Apr. 2021.

• CLC. Provided by : CCAC North Library. Located at : https://flic.kr/p/6Zr9s1 . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Terms and Concepts in Literary Criticism. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution

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Using Library of Congress Subject Headings to find literary criticism in BobCat

What are subject headings.

Subject headings are words and phrases which constitute a "controlled vocabulary" to categorize books by subject field. Subject headings often indicate the contents of books in terms that their titles do not use. In online databases, subject headings are often referred to as descriptors, but they serve the same purpose in locating valuable resources. A "keyword" search will lead to results that contain those specific terms, which can add value to a search, However, since keywords can be found anywhere (author, notes, publisher, etc.), subject headings allow you to search by topic in a more focused way.

Use general subject headings to search a broad topic or more specific subject headings for a specific text, film, or play. You will find (more) headings specific to the subject category within the left-hand facets in our online catalog, BobCat. You can see subject headings on each item's detailed catalog page in BobCat.

Using subject headings to find literary criticism

Critical works are classified and sorted by author's name, dates of birth and death, and the subheading, Criticism and Interpretation.  Here are some examples:

• Achebe, Chinua -- Criticism and interpretation
• García Márquez, Gabriel, 1928- -- Criticism and interpretation
• Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977 -- Criticism and interpretation

Literary Criticism via General / Multi-Disciplinary databases

• Humanities Source This link opens in a new window Humanities Source includes full text access to journals. It combines various Humanities related databases, including the American Humanities Index.
• JSTOR This link opens in a new window JSTOR provides access to scholarly journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to journal articles, users can access book chapters, ebooks, and primary source documents.
• Periodicals Archive Online This link opens in a new window Provides full-text and full-image access to hundreds of journals published in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and areas of general popular interest. Each periodical is covered back to its first issue, regardless of when it began publication. International in scope, PAO covers periodicals in a number of Western languages.

• ProQuest Central This link opens in a new window ProQuest Central is a large, multidisciplinary database with over 11,000 titles, with over 8,000 titles in full-text. It serves as the central resource for researchers at all levels in all markets. Over 160 subjects areas are covered extensively in this product including business and economics, health and medical, news and world affairs, technology, social sciences and more.

Literary Criticism via Subject Specific databases

• Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) This link opens in a new window The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) indexes scholarship in the fields of English language and literature, folklore, and English-language film and television studies.
• Literature Criticism Online This link opens in a new window Literature Criticism Online includes the contents of several multidisciplinary series, including Contemporary Literary Criticism and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. The collection includes biographical essays and selected literary criticism for authors from the classical period to the present day.
• Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window Literature Online includes full text of literary works in English from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It also includes the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, together with biographic and bibliographic reference materials for each author. More information less... A fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose. LION is the single most extensive and wide-ranging online collection of English and American literature.Resources included in this resource are: Bibliographies Biographies Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Encyclopedia of African Literature Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2 vols.) Encyclopedia of the Novel Handbook of African American Literature New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Oxford Companion to Irish Literature Penguin Classics Introductions Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (2nd Edition)
• Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window Literature Resource Center offers biographical and other background information for research on literary topics, authors, and their works. Its coverage includes all genres and disciplines, all time periods, and all regions of the world. Literature Resource Center's content comes from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and more, including full text of selected poems, plays, and short stories.

• Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive (TLS) This link opens in a new window The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive contains every page of every copy of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) published from 1902 to 2011. The database is searchable by author or contributor; the identities of the contributors to the TLS who were published anonymously until 1974 are disclosed for the first time and augmented by biographical sketches.

Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism

The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism is an indispensable resource for scholars and students of literary theory and discourse. Presents a comprehensive historical survey of the field's most important figures, schools, and movements.

• Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism This link opens in a new window

Database search tips

Here are some tips for better search results in databases..

This usage works on most databases, but check 'Help' sections for supported search syntax.

Boolean: (using operators: and, or, not)

• mother AND father searches for occurrences of both words within scope defined.
• mother OR father searches for one or all, but both are not required.
• mother NOT father searches for occurrences of the word ‘mother’ without use of the word ‘father.’
• (mother NOT father) AND god searches for occurrences of the word ‘mother’ without use of the word ‘father,’ then also requires the word ‘god.’

Truncation:

art* (asterisk as truncation character) searches for art, arts, artistic, artful, etc.

m?n (question mark as wildcard character) searches for man and men.

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6: Literary Criticism

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• Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap
• City College of San Francisco via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative
• 6.1: What is Literary Criticism? Using Theory as Lens
• 6.2: Types of Literary Theory
• 6.3: Formalism
• 6.4: Psychoanalytic Criticism
• 6.5: Gender Criticism
• 6.6: Postcolonial Criticism
• 6.7: New Historicism
• 6.8: Ecocriticism
• 6.9: Aristotle. Poetics. (335 B.C.) Aristotle's Poetics, in a translation by S.H. Butcher. Original text includes Greek text and commentary.
• 6.10: Eliot, T.S. "Hamlet and His Problems" from The Sacred Wood (1919)

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Literary Criticism - An Introduction

• Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism

Sample Criticism

Literary Criticism is analysis, interpretation and evaluation of authors and their works of literature, which can include novels, short stories, essays, plays and poetry.

Such critical analysis is often written by literary critics and is found in essays, articles and books.

Literary "criticism" is not necessarily negative; "criticism" means a thoughtful critique of an author's work or an author's style in order to better understand the meaning, symbolism or influences of a particular piece or a body of literature.

Schools of Literary Theory

Literary critics may analyze works of literature from a particular philosophical or literary perspective. These perspectives often develop as a response to the political, economic, cultural, educational and artistic climate of a historical period. These perspectives, referred to as Schools of Literary Criticism, may include, but are not limited to, the following:

NOTE : This is not an exhaustive list. There is ongoing debate as to naming conventions and overlap between the literary schools

The excerpt below is taken from a scholarly essay titled "Publish or Perish: Food, Hunger, and Self-Construction in Maxine Hong Kingston's  The Woman Warrior." 

Note how criticism argues an interpretation of a text, and supports and explores that argument by bringing in examples from the text (symbols, quotes, plot, character, etc.)   under study as well as  ideas from other critics .

(click on image to enlarge)

The critic's argument: "Although I will locate Maxine's concerns with physical survival on the essentialist 'side' of the debate, and her concerns with imaginative survival on the constructivist side, my larger interest will be to trace how Kingston defines and redefines food and hunger in ways that constantly blur that too tidy distinction."

Full text linked below:

• Publish or Perish: Food, Hunger, and Self-Construction in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

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Literary theory, learn more about schools of literary criticism from library reference sources..

Search by specific schools of criticism or the broader term: literary criticism.

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These three GCC Library databases can help you find information on specific literary theories. Click on the image to access each database. For remote access, enter your GCC ID number as your username and 6-digit birth date as your PIN.

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Find Criticism on Literary Works

It is often helpful to find out what others have written about the literary work you are studying. Keep in mind that criticism has not been published on all literary works. It is easier to find criticism on famous authors than on more obscure writers. Individual short stories or poems can also be challenging.

Literary criticism may be found in a number of forms:

Criticism in Books

Use the NC State University Libraries Catalog to find books by critics who have studied and written about your literary author. Here's a sample search - click for demo.

1) Type Eudora Welty in Search for words: (Anywhere) box 2) Look at the Refine Your Search box on the left, and find the Subject section. Click on Criticism and Interpretation

Criticism in Journal Articles

The library subscribes to a number of online databases that help you locate literary criticism articles.

• Tip : When using any of these databases, keep in mind that your literary author would be considered the subject or topic of the article. The word author in these databases would ordinarily refer to the person who wrote the article , rather than the literary author you are studying.

MLA International Bibliography This is the most complete database that indexes scholarly literature journals. The articles are often very focused on a narrow topic. Note that MLA does not include research with a primary focus on ancient Greek and Roman (classical ) authors. For literary research on classical authors, see the Classics Research Guide .

Tip : To search for criticism on a literary author, you can usually just type the authors name in the 1st search box without limiting to a specific field .If your your literary author has also written criticism, and you want to limit to articles that are about your author, you can use the pulldown to change to SU Subjects-ALL. To narrow your search to criticism of a particular work, you can type the name of the literary work.

Literary Reference Center Plus Database including full text versions of selected literary criticism.

Academic Search Complete This is a general interdisciplinary databases that covers many topics. It's not as complete as MLA (see above). But it includes many full-text articles, so it is often a quick way to find an article.

Tip : Since this database also covers popular magazines, you should limit your search by checking the box that says Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals .

JSTOR This is a general interdisciplinary databases that covers many topics. It's not as complete as MLA (see above). JSTOR specializes in providing full text articles going back to the earliest issues of a journal. It has only scholarly journals, not popular magazines.

Tip: To search for criticism on Virginia Woolf, for example, try this: 1) Click on Advanced Search 2) Type Virginia Woolf in The Exact Phrase Box (or, type the name of the specific literary work) 3) Check off Language and Literature in the bottom section under These Discipline(s) and/or Journal(s)

Book Reviews

For some current literature or popular books, there may be no criticism published in scholary books or journals, but you may still find book reviews in popular magazines or newspapers.

Academic Search Complete This is a general interdisciplinary databases that covers many topics, including both scholarly journals and popular magazines, so it includes many book review.

Tip: Type the name of the book . If you choose, you can limit your search book reviews by using the Document Type box under Limit Your Results

Reference Compilations

This series of reference books collects and reprints literary criticism that was originally published in other places. It includes both excerpts and full reprints. This makes it easy to find criticism written by different people collected in one place. The reprints are arranged chronologically, starting with the earliest. Therefore, these is a good place to look if you want to learn what people were saying about a particular literary work right after it was published, and then trace how opinions evolved over time. The list below show the different series, which are based on the time period that the author live and wrote. If you don't know which set to use, keep in mind that the cumulative indexes in the last volume of each series cross-index one another.

Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC) [authors now living, or who died after December 31, 1999] D. H. Hill Jr. Library. PN80 .C65 (6th floor bookstacks)

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (TCLC) [authors who died between 1900 and 1999] D. H. Hill Jr. Library. PN771 .G27 (6th floor bookstacks)

Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (NCLC) [authors who died between 1800 and 1899] D. H. Hill Jr. Library PN761 .N56 (6th floor bookstacks)

Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800 (LC) [authors who died between 1400 and 1799] D. H. Hill Library. PN86 .L53 (6th floor bookstacks)

Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism (CMLC) [authors who died before 1400] D. H. Hill Jr. Library PN661 .C42 (Learning Commons)

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12 of the Best Books of Literary Criticism Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Literary criticism (or even ‘literary theory’) goes back as far as ancient Greece, and Aristotle’s Poetics . But the rise of English Literature as a university subject, at the beginning of the twentieth century, led to literary criticism focusing on English literature – everything from Shakespeare to contemporary literature – being taken seriously.

Numerous masterpieces have been produced in the ‘genre’: here are a dozen of the most significant and notable works of literary criticism written in English.

Disclaimer: as an Amazon Associate, we get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

1. F. H. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy .

In 1904, this immeasurably influential study of Shakespeare’s tragedies appeared. It is still in print – as an affordable Penguin Classics edition – and although Bradley sometimes treats the characters a little too much as though they were real people rather than imaginary constructions, there’s a raft of lucid insights into the plays to be had. Given how early this landmark work of literary criticism was published, it’s still endlessly readable thanks to Bradley’s colloquial and relatable style.

2. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism .

Published in 1929, this book is as much the write-up to an educational experiment as it is a work of traditional literary criticism. Richards, whose lectures were hugely popular at Cambridge during the 1920s, gave his students a series of short poems with the authors and dates removed. This encouraged students to respond to the words on the page, paying close attention to the form and style of the poem and their response to the poem’s features. Richards’s work would influence American New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century – and his most famous pupil, William Empson …

3. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity .

William Empson (1906-1984) was a poet as well as a critic , and this probably helped him to get under the skin, as it were, of many of the poems he analyses in this pioneering work of poetry criticism, published in 1930 and written when he was still only in his early twenties (and completed shortly after he had been expelled from the University of Cambridge when contraceptives were found in his rooms).

Taking his examples from Geoffrey Chaucer as well as T. S. Eliot, Empson wittily examines the various ways in which poets generate ambiguity in their work, from simple examples to more complex and less easily resolved instances. Jonathan Bate called Empson the funniest critic of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most illuminating.

4. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us .

This landmark work of literary analysis was first published in 1934, and is a fascinating study of Shakespeare’s writing and well worth reading. Spurgeon examines the images of Shakespeare’s plays in order to find out what sorts of images he most frequently draws on and what this might tell us about him, especially in terms of his relation to his contemporaries.

Stephen Fry has called it a sort of early version of what we’d now call digital fingerprinting, whereby digital analysis shows word frequencies and usage in Shakespeare’s work. It is a good study of what makes Shakespeare so peculiar alongside his fellow Elizabethan and Jacobean writers.

5. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition .

6. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp .

Not to be confused with the title of a Hilary Mantel novel, this ground-breaking study of Romanticism was published in 1953 and showed how, until the Romantics, art was seen to reflect the world (like a mirror), whereas the Romantics – and various writers and critics who have come along since – thought that art should illuminate the world (like a light). Abrams was born in 1912 and died at the ripe old age of 102 in 2015; this remained his most significant work, and one of the most important mid-century works of literary criticism.

7. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism .

When literary critics of some reputation taught at summer schools in the mid-twentieth century, they would often teach ‘the poetry course’ or ‘the Shakespeare course’. When Frye turned up to teach, he’d be asked to teach ‘the Northrop Frye course’.

As this anecdote suggests, Frye’s influence on twentieth-century literary criticism was vast and distinguished, and he was writing at the peak of his powers when he penned this 1957 ‘anatomy’ of types of literature, adopting a structuralist approach to genre and form. Among other things, Frye’s book makes you want to go away and read all of the famous works of poetry, drama, and fiction which he draws upon.

8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics .

Bringing together various ‘isms’ and literary theories from the twentieth century, including feminist literary criticism, Marxism, and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, Spivak offers what might be described as an intersectional analysis of the relationship between women and their language and culture, in both western and non-western cultures. This book is as much cultural theory as it is literary criticism, although it also contains some astute readings of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse , Yeats’s work, and Wordsworth’s The Prelude .

9. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic .

Published in 1979, this joint-authored book is a vast and highly readable study of Victorian fiction written by women, including the Brontës and George Eliot. The book’s title, of course, is taken from Bertha Mason/Rochester, Mr Rochester’s first wife whom he locks away in his house (technically, in the room below the attic) in Jane Eyre . Gilbert and Gubar’s enjoyable and perceptive analysis of the various tropes, symbols, and images nineteenth-century female novelists employed in their work makes for a provocative and persuasive account of the ways in which women negotiated the patriarchal society about which, and in which, they wrote.

10. Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry .

This 1984 volume is a collection of essays written during the 1960s-1980s, by one of the greatest living critics of poetry. Upon reading Ricks’s biography of Tennyson, W. H. Auden called Ricks ‘exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding’. But Ricks is also a brilliant writer too, with a fondness (some would say weakness) for puns and wordplay of all kinds. He clearly has great fun pondering the significance of a semi-colon or set of parentheses, or the meaning of a particular image or word. This volume includes essays on, among others, medieval poet John Gower, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Geoffrey Hill, and Stevie Smith.

11. Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind .

Ranging from Shakespeare to Raymond Chandler, Royle reads canonical and non-canonical works of fiction, poetry, and drama through the lens of telepathy, exploring new ways of thinking about literary texts and the relationship between reader and author. Influenced by Derrida but far more accessible, Royle’s readings are perhaps the best way to begin learning how to write ‘creative criticism’: criticism that reimagines what the literary-critical essay might look like, while still offering some wonderfully nuanced and sensitive close readings of the texts under discussion.

12. Eleanor Cook, Against Coercion: Games Poets Play .

Cook, who taught at the University of Toronto, collected some of her most important essays on a range of poets – including T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens – in this book in 1998. From the opening essay, in which Cook convincingly argues that Eliot’s The Waste Land was partly a response to Eliot’s reading of John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace , it’s clear that Cook is a superlative critic who marries close reading of classic works of poetry to their various literary, social, and economic contexts. Cook has written other fine books, including a study of riddles and enigmas throughout literature, but this is the place to begin.

4 thoughts on “12 of the Best Books of Literary Criticism Everyone Should Read”

John Updike Hugging the Shore is an excellent read ..prompted me to reread and appreciate Melville.

Thanks for the reading list there

I like the numerous works of the eminent US critic Harold Bloom – incl his books Genius and The Western Canon

Well worth obtaining

Thanks for this – I’m a big fan of literary criticism, and have for a long time been trying to get more people to see its beauty and value. Regarding Leavisite criticism, I’d recommend to all Matthew Arnold’s ‘Culture and Anarchy’ (or his essay ‘Preface to Poetry’), too; I think there’s a strong association between the types of criticism they wrote. Some of T. S. Eliot’s critical essays are also filled with intellectual verve. I’ll certainly look into Royle’s ‘Telepathy’, sounds like it’d be a good read!

“Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature” by Erich Auerbach, 1946.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160221/mimesis

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Writers withdraw from PEN America literary awards in support of Gaza

Authors and translators say PEN America has ‘had no criticism of American complicity in the bombardment of Gaza’, in stark contrast to other national centres of the organisation

Thirty-one authors and translators have withdrawn their work from consideration for or declined PEN America’s 2024 literary awards over the organisation’s “failure to protect” Palestinian writers in Gaza.

Nine out of 10 longlistees for the PEN/Jean Stein book award, worth $75,000 (£60,143), have withdrawn their books. Christina Sharpe, Catherine Lacey and Joseph Earl Thomas are among the withdrawing writers.

Twenty-one of the withdrawing authors, along with nine additional writers, signed a letter on Tuesday calling for the immediate resignation of the organisation’s CEO, Suzanne Nossel; the president, Jennifer Finney Boylan and the entire executive committee.

The letter highlights the “stark contrast” between the stance of PEN America and those of other PEN centres around the world. “English PEN, in tandem with Irish PEN and Wales PEN Cymru, have been vocally critical of the UK government’s uncritical support for Israel, have called for investigations into the sale of arms to Israel, and have demanded political pressure for Israel to comply with international law. PEN America, by contrast, has had no criticism of American complicity in the bombardment of Gaza,” the letter read.

Maya Binyam, who withdrew her debut novel Hangman from the Jean Stein award and the $10,000 (£8,020) PEN/Hemingway award, said in a post on X that the organisation’s leadership “should be ashamed that their failures have forced these decisions on to authors whose work deserves to be celebrated”.

Earlier this month, Esther Allen declined the PEN/Ralph Manheim award for translation, a prize conferred every three years for a translator’s body of work. She said she turned down the prize in solidarity with the writers who have criticised PEN America’s “silence on the genocidal murder of Palestinians”.

In a statement, PEN America said it “has built and maintained a fragile big tent for discourse across difference for over a century.”

“The current war in Gaza is horrific,” it added. “But we cannot agree that the answer to its wrenching dilemmas and consequences lies in less discourse, less honouring of writers, and less shining a light on the critical contributions of writers.”

A spokesperson from PEN America said the organisation is in touch with the authors nominated for the PEN/Jean Stein award and has “paused on announcing the finalists”.

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The withdrawals come after a group of writers including Naomi Klein, Hisham Matar and Lorrie Moore withdrew from PEN America’s World Voices festival. In a letter sent in March, the writers said PEN America had “betrayed the organisation’s professed commitment to peace and equality for all, and to freedom and security for writers everywhere”.

While nearly 50 PEN centres signed PEN International’s call for a ceasefire in late October, PEN America did not join the call until 20 March , which many protesting writers considered too late. Alejandro Varela, who was longlisted for the Jean Stein award, tweeted that he cannot align himself with a “human rights org that waits five months to call for a ceasefire in Gaza”.

“PEN International calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, an end to the siege of Gaza, immediate access to humanitarian aid, and the release of all hostages,” said Romana Cacchioli, executive director of PEN International. However, she noted that each of the organisation’s 130 centres, which are located across 90 countries, is autonomous. “As a freedom of expression organisation, we respect the right of our centres to hold different positions. We respect the right of the writers to withdraw from the festival”, she said.

Tuesday’s letter notes that many of the signatories who are early in their careers and “rely on prize money to fund their basic needs” understand “the risks we are taking by rejecting an organisation that holds a cultural monopoly within the literary community”.

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NPR in Turmoil After It Is Accused of Liberal Bias

An essay from an editor at the broadcaster has generated a firestorm of criticism about the network on social media, especially among conservatives.

By Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson

NPR is facing both internal tumult and a fusillade of attacks by prominent conservatives this week after a senior editor publicly claimed the broadcaster had allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage, risking its trust with audiences.

Uri Berliner, a senior business editor who has worked at NPR for 25 years, wrote in an essay published Tuesday by The Free Press, a popular Substack publication, that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.”

Mr. Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist, castigated NPR for what he said was a litany of journalistic missteps around coverage of several major news events, including the origins of Covid-19 and the war in Gaza. He also said the internal culture at NPR had placed race and identity as “paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

Mr. Berliner’s essay has ignited a firestorm of criticism of NPR on social media, especially among conservatives who have long accused the network of political bias in its reporting. Former President Donald J. Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to argue that NPR’s government funding should be rescinded, an argument he has made in the past.

NPR has forcefully pushed back on Mr. Berliner’s accusations and the criticism.

“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” Edith Chapin, the organization’s editor in chief, said in an email to staff on Tuesday. “We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world.” Some other NPR journalists also criticized the essay publicly, including Eric Deggans, its TV critic, who faulted Mr. Berliner for not giving NPR an opportunity to comment on the piece.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Berliner expressed no regrets about publishing the essay, saying he loved NPR and hoped to make it better by airing criticisms that have gone unheeded by leaders for years. He called NPR a “national trust” that people rely on for fair reporting and superb storytelling.

“I decided to go out and publish it in hopes that something would change, and that we get a broader conversation going about how the news is covered,” Mr. Berliner said.

He said he had not been disciplined by managers, though he said he had received a note from his supervisor reminding him that NPR requires employees to clear speaking appearances and media requests with standards and media relations. He said he didn’t run his remarks to The New York Times by network spokespeople.

When the hosts of NPR’s biggest shows, including “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” convened on Wednesday afternoon for a long-scheduled meet-and-greet with the network’s new chief executive, Katherine Maher , conversation soon turned to Mr. Berliner’s essay, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting. During the lunch, Ms. Chapin told the hosts that she didn’t want Mr. Berliner to become a “martyr,” the people said.

Mr. Berliner’s essay also sent critical Slack messages whizzing through some of the same employee affinity groups focused on racial and sexual identity that he cited in his essay. In one group, several staff members disputed Mr. Berliner’s points about a lack of ideological diversity and said efforts to recruit more people of color would make NPR’s journalism better.

On Wednesday, staff members from “Morning Edition” convened to discuss the fallout from Mr. Berliner’s essay. During the meeting, an NPR producer took issue with Mr. Berliner’s argument for why NPR’s listenership has fallen off, describing a variety of factors that have contributed to the change.

Mr. Berliner’s remarks prompted vehement pushback from several news executives. Tony Cavin, NPR’s managing editor of standards and practices, said in an interview that he rejected all of Mr. Berliner’s claims of unfairness, adding that his remarks would probably make it harder for NPR journalists to do their jobs.

“The next time one of our people calls up a Republican congressman or something and tries to get an answer from them, they may well say, ‘Oh, I read these stories, you guys aren’t fair, so I’m not going to talk to you,’” Mr. Cavin said.

Some journalists have defended Mr. Berliner’s essay. Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, NPR’s former ombudsman, said Mr. Berliner was “not wrong” on social media. Chuck Holmes, a former managing editor at NPR, called Mr. Berliner’s essay “brave” on Facebook.

Mr. Berliner’s criticism was the latest salvo within NPR, which is no stranger to internal division. In October, Mr. Berliner took part in a lengthy debate over whether NPR should defer to language proposed by the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association while covering the conflict in Gaza.

“We don’t need to rely on an advocacy group’s guidance,” Mr. Berliner wrote, according to a copy of the email exchange viewed by The Times. “Our job is to seek out the facts and report them.” The debate didn’t change NPR’s language guidance, which is made by editors who weren’t part of the discussion. And in a statement on Thursday, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association said it is a professional association for journalists, not a political advocacy group.

Mr. Berliner’s public criticism has highlighted broader concerns within NPR about the public broadcaster’s mission amid continued financial struggles. Last year, NPR cut 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts, including the popular “Invisibilia,” as it tried to make up for a $30 million budget shortfall. Listeners have drifted away from traditional radio to podcasts, and the advertising market has been unsteady.

In his essay, Mr. Berliner laid some of the blame at the feet of NPR’s former chief executive, John Lansing, who said he was retiring at the end of last year after four years in the role. He was replaced by Ms. Maher, who started on March 25.

During a meeting with employees in her first week, Ms. Maher was asked what she thought about decisions to give a platform to political figures like Ronna McDaniel, the former Republican Party chair whose position as a political analyst at NBC News became untenable after an on-air revolt from hosts who criticized her efforts to undermine the 2020 election.

“I think that this conversation has been one that does not have an easy answer,” Ms. Maher responded.

Benjamin Mullin reports on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact Ben securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or email at [email protected] . More about Benjamin Mullin

Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email:  [email protected]   More about Katie Robertson