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LITERARY CRITICISM – HANDWRITTEN NOTES (UGC NET Focus)

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📌 1. What is Literary Criticism?

• The disciplined analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of literature.

• Helps us understand how texts work, why they matter, and what meanings they generate.

• Moves from author → text → reader → culture, depending on school of criticism.

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📚 2. Classical Criticism

Aristotle (384–322 BCE)

Key Work: Poetics

• Mimesis: Literature imitates life, but elevates it.

• Plot (Mythos): The soul of tragedy.

• Catharsis: Purging of pity & fear.

• Hamartia: Tragic flaw.

• Parts of Tragedy: Plot, Character, Thought, Diction, Melody, Spectacle.

Plato

• Art = Imitation of imitation → Distrust of poets.

• Wanted poets banned from the Republic.

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📚 3. Medieval Criticism

St. Augustine

• Literature as moral instruction.

Dante

• Introduces allegory as interpretative method.

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📚 4. Renaissance Criticism

Philip Sidney – An Apology for Poetry

• Defence of poetry

• Poet = “Maker”

• Poetry delights + teaches (Horatian blend)

Sir Francis Bacon

• Essays as moral, reflective criticism.

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📚 5. Neoclassical Criticism

John Dryden

• Comparative criticism → Shakespeare vs Ben Jonson.

• Favors Nature, decorum, and rules.

Alexander Pope

• Essay on Criticism:

  • “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

  • Emphasizes correctness, wit, clarity.

Samuel Johnson

• Practical criticism

• Shakespeare praised for realism.

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📚 6. Romantic Criticism

Wordsworth – Preface to Lyrical Ballads

• Poetry = “Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

• Language of common man.

Coleridge – Biographia Literaria

• Primary & secondary imagination.

• Fancy vs imagination.

Shelley

• Poet = “Unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

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📚 7. Victorian Criticism

Matthew Arnold

• Touchstone method

• Literature as a substitute for religion

• Critical spirit, moral seriousness

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📚 8. Modern Criticism

T.S. Eliot

• Tradition and the Individual Talent

  • Impersonal theory of poetry

  • Poet must escape emotion

  • Objective correlative

• Hamlet → Artistic failure

I.A. Richards (New Criticism father)

• Close reading

• Four kinds of meaning

• Practical criticism

Cleanth Brooks

• Paradox, irony, unity of text.

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📚 9. Psychoanalytic Criticism

Freud

• Oedipus complex, dreams, repression.

• Literature = Expression of unconscious.

Jung

• Archetypes → collective unconscious.

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📚 10. Marxist Criticism

Karl Marx

• Base & superstructure

• Class struggle.

Raymond Williams / Terry Eagleton

• Literature = cultural production.

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📚 11. Feminist Criticism

Simone de Beauvoir

• “One is not born, but becomes, a woman.”

Elaine Showalter

• Gynocriticism → women’s writing tradition.

Gilbert & Gubar

• The Madwoman in the Attic

• Angel vs monster paradigm.

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📚 12. Structuralism & Post-Structuralism

Saussure

• Sign = signifier + signified

• Meaning is relational.

Roland Barthes

• Death of the Author

• Reader = producer of meaning.

Derrida

• Deconstruction

• Différance

• Text = unstable, infinite meanings.

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📚 13. Reader-Response Theory

Wolfgang Iser

• Implied reader

• Gaps in text.

Stanley Fish

• Interpretive communities.

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📚 14. New Historicism

Stephen Greenblatt

• Power, discourse, culture

• Literature = historical energy.

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📚 15. Postcolonial Criticism

Frantz Fanon

• Psychological effects of colonisation.

Edward Said – Orientalism

• West’s construction of the East.

Homi Bhabha

• Hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence.

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📚 16. Cultural Studies

Stuart Hall

• Representation

• Encoding/decoding model.