Literary criticism is the reasoned analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of literature. It examines how literary works create meaning, how their language and form operate, and how they relate to authors, readers, and societies. “Criticism” does not necessarily mean fault-finding: it includes explanation, appreciation, comparison, and judgments of literary merit. Its objects range from individual passages to entire works, genres, and literary traditions. (dictionary.cambridge.org)
Scope and Related Disciplines
Criticism overlaps with literary theory, but the terms emphasize different activities. Theory develops general concepts about literature, meaning, representation, and interpretation; criticism commonly applies or tests such concepts through particular texts. The distinction is not absolute, since interpretations depend on assumptions about what counts as literature and what constitutes relevant evidence. Criticism may emphasize aesthetics, historical circumstances, readers’ responses, or the social conditions of literary production. (iep.utm.edu)
Literary history studies changes in writing, genres, and literary institutions over time, while biographical criticism investigates relationships between writers’ lives and their works. Both can inform interpretation without exhausting it. Criticism also participates in forming and revising the literary canon: the works selected for sustained attention, publication, and teaching. These selections themselves become subjects of critical inquiry. (iep.utm.edu)
Historical Development
In ancient Greece, Plato questioned poetry’s relation to truth and its moral effects. Aristotle approached literary works through their forms and organization; his Poetics analyzed tragedy, plot, characterization, and representation. Later classical critics addressed literary excellence, persuasive expression, and the sublime. Their writings supplied concepts repeatedly adapted by subsequent European criticism rather than a single, unchanging system of rules. (en.wikisource.org)
Critical traditions also developed outside Europe. Indian poetics examined verbal ornament, style, suggestion, and rasa, the aesthetic experience or relish associated with poetry and performance. The treatment of rasa in the Natyashastra was subsequently extended and debated by theorists of poetry. Chinese criticism developed systematic accounts of literary composition and value, notably Liu Xie’s Wenxin diaolong, which considers literary expression alongside moral and intellectual substance. These traditions have distinct vocabularies and histories. (ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in)
European criticism drew renewed authority from classical models during the Renaissance. Later, Romanticism emphasized imagination and creative individuality. During the nineteenth century, historical and biographical approaches became prominent, while critics such as Matthew Arnold connected literary judgment with broader cultural questions. The twentieth century brought competing approaches centered on textual form, social structures, language, and the activity of reading. (en.wikisource.org)
Textual Analysis and Evidence
A central practice is close reading: sustained attention to a text’s wording, patterns, and organization. Critics examine diction, syntax, metaphor, imagery, and irony, asking how these features contribute to interpretation. In fiction, analysis may distinguish the author from the narrator and investigate narrative perspective, characterization, and plot. Identifying a technique is only a starting point; analysis explains what it does in the work. (owl.purdue.edu)
Critical arguments ordinarily develop a claim supported by selected passages and explanations of their significance. A reading may connect details across a work, investigate tensions between what characters say and what events reveal, or compare plausible interpretations. Plot summary supplies necessary orientation but is not equivalent to criticism. The relationship between evidence and argument is especially important when a text permits ambiguity or contains apparently contradictory elements. (owl.purdue.edu)
Major Critical Approaches
Russian Formalism investigated the devices that distinguish literary language from ordinary communication. Anglo-American New Criticism, influential in the mid-twentieth century, emphasized close reading and the interaction of elements within a work. Associated critics examined ambiguity, paradox, and irony while resisting explanations based primarily on authors’ intentions or readers’ emotional reactions. Its name derives from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism. (en.wikipedia.org)
Structuralism analyzes works through systems of relationships and conventions rather than treating each work as wholly isolated. Its connections with linguistics helped encourage systematic investigation of literary meaning and narrative organization. Narratology studies such matters as narrative sequence, perspective, and the relationships between events and their presentation. These approaches shifted attention from individual expression toward the structures that make texts intelligible. (encyclopedia.com)
Deconstruction examines tensions within texts and conceptual oppositions that appear to organize their meanings. Rather than merely declaring that a work has no meaning, it investigates how an argument or hierarchy may depend on distinctions that the text itself complicates. Reader-response criticism, by contrast, gives particular attention to readers’ participation in producing meaning and to the conventions or expectations governing interpretation. Neither designation identifies a completely uniform method. (iep.utm.edu)
Marxist criticism examines class, ideology, and literature’s relationships with material production. Feminist criticism investigates gendered representation, authorship, and exclusions from literary institutions. Postcolonial criticism addresses colonial histories and their cultural consequences. New Historicism reads literary works alongside other historical documents, examining their participation in contemporary relations of power. These approaches can employ detailed textual analysis while challenging interpretations that isolate works from their social circumstances. (iep.utm.edu)
Public and Academic Practice
Criticism circulates through essays, scholarly books, journals, reviews, and teaching. Public reviewing often responds to newly published works, whereas academic criticism may pursue sustained historical or theoretical investigation. These activities overlap: critics outside universities have shaped literary reputations, and scholarly interpretations influence wider reading practices. Twentieth-century literary study also expanded into interdisciplinary cultural analysis, bringing literary methods into conversation with philosophy, anthropology, media studies, and other fields. (encyclopedia.com)