Introduction to Literary Theory
Key concepts, major schools, and useful approaches for reading and analyzing texts.
1. What Is Literary Theory?
| Aspect |
Explanation |
| Definition |
A set of systematic ideas and methods used to interpret, evaluate, and understand literature. |
| Purpose |
Explains how and why texts produce meaning, how readers engage with them, and how cultural, historical, and ideological forces shape literature. |
| Scope |
Ranges from close textual analysis to broad sociocultural critique. |
| Relation to Criticism |
Theory provides the framework; criticism applies that framework to specific works. |
2. Historical Overview
| Period |
Main Movements |
Representative Thinkers |
| Classical (5th c. BC – 5th c. AD) |
Rhetoric, Poetics |
Aristotle (Poetics), Horace |
| Romantic (late 18th – early 19th c.) |
Emphasis on imagination, the author’s genius |
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Friedrich Schlegel |
| Modernist (early 20th c.) |
Formalist focus on the text itself |
Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson |
| Post‑Modern (mid‑20th c. onward) |
Questioning of stable meaning, power relations |
Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault |
| Contemporary (21st c.) |
Interdisciplinary, digital, ecocritical, affect theory |
Judith Butler, Jane Bennett, Sara Ahmed |
3. Major Theoretical Approaches
3.1 Formalism / New Criticism
- Core idea: The text is an autonomous object; meaning resides in its internal structures.
- Key tools: Close reading, analysis of irony, paradox, tension, and organic unity.
- Critique: Ignores authorial intent, historical context, and reader response.
3.2 Structuralism
- Core idea: Language and narrative function like a system of signs; meaning emerges from underlying structures.
- Key concepts: Binary oppositions, narrative functions (Propp), semiotic codes (Barthes).
- Critique: Tends toward determinism; overlooks historical change.
3.3 Post‑Structuralism / Deconstruction
- Core idea: Texts contain internal contradictions that undermine fixed meanings.
- Key tools: Binary reversal, différance, aporia.
- Representative: Jacques Derrida.
- Critique: Can be seen as overly relativistic.
3.4 Marxist / Historical Materialism
- Core idea: Literature reflects and reproduces class relations and economic conditions.
- Key concepts: Base‑superstructure, ideology, false consciousness.
- Representative: Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson.
- Critique: May reduce artistic complexity to economics.
3.5 Psychoanalytic / Freudian & Lacanian
- Core idea: Texts reveal unconscious desires, anxieties, and symbolic structures.
- Key tools: Oedipal analysis, the mirror stage, the symbolic order.
- Representative: Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva.
- Critique: Overemphasis on pathology; cultural specificity can be limited.
3.6 Feminist & Gender Theory
- Core idea: Literature constructs and perpetuates gendered power dynamics.
- Key concepts: Patriarchal discourse, the male gaze, intersectionality.
- Representative: Elaine Showalter, Judith