Literary theory
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis.[1] Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning.[1] In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism.[2] Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy.
Overview[edit]
One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "what is literature?" and "how should or do we read?" – although some contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they create meaning in a "text". However, some theorists acknowledge that these texts do not have a singular, fixed meaning which is deemed "correct".[7]
Since theorists of literature often draw on very heterogeneous traditions of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of language, any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many types of literary theory, which take different approaches to texts. Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include historical and biographical criticism, New Criticism, formalism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism or historical materialism, feminism and French feminism, post-colonialism, new historicism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, narratology and psychoanalytic criticism.
Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors: