English Literature And Theory This blog contains the explanation of various critical theories that provide a new insight to view literature and interpretation of various literary texts.

New criticism subjugated literary studies from 1940s to 1960s. Before the birth of New Criticism, Pre-Critical theory was the major tool to examine a literary work. At that time aesthetic beauty and biographical-historical background were considered important to interpret a text which was not enough but as New Criticism emerged text was considered as important factor to be criticized. Previously writer were given more priority but in New Criticism text bore significance.

Some characteristics of New Criticism are:

• It governed literary study from 1940 to 1960.
• It is not practiced any longer.
• It provides a framework for how to handle the text. It teaches about the tools and how to apply it.It is universal to every text.
• New Criticism is still important as it provides theoretical framework. It tells us about the devices, metaphor, irony, ambiguity.
• It helps us understand other theories that emerged as a reaction against New Criticism (Structuralism, Deconstruction, etc)
• New Criticism focused on "text". It searches the evidences in the text through reading.

• In New Criticism, a literary work, text is timeless as it is written only once and can never be changed.
• Literary text is autonomous(self-sufficient). When text is written, we can not add or reduce the text after completing it.
• Literary text is verbal because when science technology hadn't developed printing system, literature was taken as verbal object.
• New Criticism focused mainly on the complex meaning(aesthetic beauty) which is generated from formal elements. Words placed out in a specific order gives out a complex meaning.
• New Criticism also focused on poetry. It believes we can't use paraphrasing/translation to establish meaning of the text. To understand a poetry stanza we paraphrase or summarize it but it cannot generate the true meaning of the poem. The complete meaning of the poem can only be explained when we use the formal elements that could generate the actual and true meaning of any text or poem.