Literary Theory and Criticism – A Comprehensive Guide

Understanding literary theory and criticism is necessary for students studying disciplines related to social sciences in general, and specifically for students who are into the study of literature.

A strong grip on different literary theories like Marxism, Feminism, and criticism traditions like ecocriticism and so on, helps scholars to view specific texts, usually a novel or even a non-fiction prose, through a unique lens. 

In order to derive similarities between them and present those books as a representation of literary movements and their themes. Literary theory provides frameworks for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating literary texts to highlight diverse perspectives ingrained in a text.

These theories assist students in revealing unique dimensions of meaning hidden in words using a specific lens.

Introduction to Literary Theory

A literary theory is a unique idea or perspective conveying the thought process of the intellectuals associated with a certain tradition encompassing different historical periods. These theories are postulated by different literary figures of the movements and present some common themes or ideas that become the representation of literary works produced during a specific time period.

For example, the literary works produced around or after the publication of “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” in 1792 by Mary Wollstonecraft. Books sharing the ideas discussed in it are being marked as feminist works only because this essay has worked as a manifesto of Feminism, either literary or socially.

Critics have started using this lens to analyze the works produced by different authors across the globe around the 18th century and even today in the 21st century.

Understanding Literary Theories

Literary theories are systematic approaches used to interpret different texts, such as essays, novels, poems, etc, through a certain historical, political, social, economic, or even psychological lens. 

These theories work as conceptual frameworks that allow readers who are just turning the pages of the book for enjoyment to explore literary aspects beyond the surface-level enjoyment phrases.

Each theory tends to focus on a specific aspect of the study. For example, psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud is meant to focus on psychological narratives of the text. 

Whether you need to write a research paper on comparing Marxist theory and feminism in the 20th century, or just an investigative study of exploring structuralist themes in essays.  You need to keep in mind the following points to conduct perfect research.

• Literary theories are tools for interpretation, not rigid rules to be implemented every time while analyzing any study.
• It is possible that a single thing can be a perfect representation of different theories at one time. For example, “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green is the best reflection of naturalism and existentialism at one time.
• Every theory is a representation of a specific historical and cultural context. For example, Marxism in literature represents the 20th century and the class struggle of labourers.
• Keeping in mind that theories continually evolve as their critiques or scholars expand or even transform the existing frameworks.

Literary Theory Overview

Literary theory doesn’t come into existence overnight; it takes years or sometimes centuries to evolve one idea into a movement, and then it takes the shape of a literary theory. If you are looking to write a case study assignment for your college, then consider presenting an overview of any literary movement of your choice.

Literary theory develops in distinct cycles throughout history, reflecting intellectual climates and sociopolitical contexts associated with it, from economic to political factors. Here are some of the timelines representing the birth and evolution of different literary movements till today.

Make sure to track the traces of every movement under observation to know the real postulates or ideas of any theory before using it to analyze your study.

1. Classical and Medieval Period: In this period, literary hypotheses are focused on expression, mimesis (imitation of reality), a concept introduced by Aristotle in his Poetics, and didactic functions of literature.

2. Renaissance to Reformation through the 19th Century: This age revolves around the emphasis upon aesthetic values, emotional responses, and formal qualities of literary pieces. 

3. Early 20th Century: In the early 20th century, literary critics introduced close reading techniques and attention to textual elements of prose to develop literary theorems. 

4. Mid-20th Century: The whole shift of literary criticism and movements tilted towards structuralism and linguistic approaches to analyze texts.

5. Late 20th Century to Present Age: Now the lens has expanded to include diverse perspectives (feminist, postcolonial, queer theory) and interdisciplinary approaches.

These developments in literary theory and criticism approaches not merely represent chronological progression in literature but also evolving concepts.

Basics of Literary Analysis

When you are going to write your English Literature or any dissertation, you need to be adept at doing literary analysis, from choosing the right movement to doing perfect textual analysis. 

Literary analysis is a practical application of using theoretical concepts like Formalism to view a specific text or sometimes texts to find supporting arguments for the research questions written in the introduction of the study. No matter which movement you are using to analyse a text, the following elements of analysis will be the same for every theory.

Make sure to use them strategically and get supporting arguments to add in your literature review of the research study.

Close Reading: To conduct a perfect literary analysis of any text, make sure to carefully examine the language, sentence structure, and formal elements of the prose.

Contextual Consideration: Try to track the historical, cultural, and biographical contexts of the work to deduce the required results.

Textual Evidence: Highlight the supporting references that you have seen in a book while analyzing it to use in the literature review writing.

Interpretive Framework: Make sure to apply theoretical concepts to organize observations into meaningful patterns to follow.

Critical Perspective: Evaluate underlying assumptions about the text and implications to match the ideas of literary theory with your research objectives.

To conduct an effective literary analysis, make sure to combine textual details with conceptual frameworks to present a wholesome picture of the research study.

Major Literary Theories – An Overview

We have shortlisted some of the most discussed or used literary theories by students or even critics. To present the key ideas associated with each literary movement and its major contributors to help you grasp each one and use it in the analysis of your study.

Make sure to use the below-mentioned points about each literary movement as a touchstone and conduct a literary analysis for your college assignment on your favorite book.

1. Formalism (New Criticism)

Formalism appeared as a reaction to literary traditions focusing on external factors of the text while doing analysis. It emerged in the early 20th century and rejected external contexts, instead advocating to treat literary works as autonomous aesthetic objects that need close textual analysis.

This school of thought got famous in American literary criticism from the 1940s through the 1960s and established close reading as a fundamental practice required in analysis. It worked really well to shift critical attention from the author’s lives and historical circumstances of the book to the internal workings.

It focuses on examining literary works based on textual analysis and how formal elements create meaning and aesthetic effects around the prose.

Core Principles of Formalism:

• It focuses on the intrinsic elements of literary texts instead of extrinsic elements.
• Formalism focuses on close reading of the text rather than analyzing its biographical or historical context.
• Treats literary works as a self-contained aesthetic object instead of looking at external factors for meaning.
• Examines internal elements of the text, like literary devices used, and language patterns.
• Values ambiguity, paradox, and tension in literary works.

Key Concepts:

Intentional Fallacy: Instead of looking at the author’s intention, the text itself is enough to interpret the prose. Formalists are of the view that the author’s intentions are irrelevant to consider for analysis because the text itself independently contains the whole meaning necessary for interpretation.

Affective Fallacy: Instead of looking at the emotional response of the readers regarding the text. Focus on doing the objective analysis of the formal qualities ingrained in the text. This concept focuses on separating the subjective reader response from critical evaluation.

Organic Unity: As the title suggests, this idea promotes the integration of all elements in a prose to create a coherent whole where every component individually plays a meaningful role in producing a unified effect. 

Close Reading: Formalism focuses on doing a close reading to extract the real meaning of the book from the text itself, instead of looking at external factors. That’s why students are required to focus on words, syntax, imagery, and structure, revealing how literary techniques are working together to generate meaning.

Major Contributors of Formalism:

• William Empson
• Cleanth Brooks
• John Crowe Ransom
• I.A. Richards

Example: 

You can conduct a literary analysis using this theory by analyzing a student’s most favorite poem, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. Keep in mind to neglect the biography of the poet Robert Frost or the historical context of the poem to work on principles of formalism.

Focus on examining the metrical patterns, structural organization, and use of symbolic language to understand how literary techniques create meaning within the poem itself in your college homework writing, and grasp the core ideas of formalism.

Structuralism

Structuralism got its base from Ferdinand de Saussure’s works in linguistics and started applying linguistic models to literature. It revolutionized literary studies in the mid-20th century and started to approach literature as a system of signs governed by underlying patterns and codes.

Instead of focusing on the individual works for analysis, structuralists sought to identify universal structures across text pieces that generate meaning. This literary theory has shifted the critical attention from the interpretation of content to the analysis of form and systems.

The core idea of this specific school of thought is to treat literature as one signifying practice among many cultural systems that reflect deeper mental structures to play around with the signified and the signifier for doing literary analysis.

Core Principles of Structuralism:

• It works on the idea of viewing literature as a system of signs and codes, either a novel or a poem.
• Structuralists focus on the linguistic patterns of the text to analyze the underlying structures that shape meaning.
• Examines prose by identifying the binary positions to trace the signified and the signifier for analysis.
• Look at the structural patterns of the work to identify how the text embodies universal linguistic patterns.
• Structuralism focuses on treating literature as one signifying system among various cultural systems or patterns available in a text.

Key Concepts:

Structured System of Signs: Structuralists focus on using language as a structured system of signs where the meaning of the text emerges from underlying relationships between signifiers and the signified. Instead of considering the inherent qualities of words, they focus on signs and codes to analyze how literary elements gain meaning through their positions within larger systems.

Binary Oppositions: You can identify the binary oppositions, like (light/dark, nature/culture, male/female), and organize principles in text. Scholars use these contrasting pairs to create meaning through difference and reveal how words encode cultural values and hierarchies, like patriarchal or matriarchal, through seemingly natural categories in a book.

Literary Genres: Structuralists mark different genres as codes that generate expectations and frame interpretation for analysis to understand a prose. It helps readers to understand how a certain genre, for example, science fiction, presents unique language patterns and meanings.

Deep Structures: Looking at a literary work to highlight universal patterns of human thought that generate the same kind of meaning across various text pieces. Scholars use these underlying frameworks to explain why similar narrative patterns appear across different cultures and time periods.

Narrative Patterns: Structuralists use the signifier and signified patterns to demonstrate how stories follow predictable structural sequences regardless of surface differences in content or setting.

Major Contributors of Formalism:

• Ferdinand de Saussure
• Claude Lévi-Strauss
• Roland Barthes (early work)
• Tzvetan Todorov
• Vladimir Propp

Example:

What’s better than bringing the most appreciated Greek drama, “Oedipus Rex” of Sophocles, to light by highlighting the elements of structuralism in it? You can point out the binary elements of opposition (fate vs free will, knowledge vs ignorance) and structural roles of King, Queen, Prophet, etc, in this work in your coursework writing tasks.

You can also consider other such works presenting a structured system of signs in them to conduct a research study by investigating structuralist elements in a literary work.

Post-Structuralism & Deconstruction

Literary figures like Jacques Derrida and others raised their voice against the stable systems of meaning ingrained in the sentences and presented an opposing idea of structuralism. That’s how post-structuralism emerged in the late 1960s as an offshoot or reaction against the already established literary movement of structuralism.

Post-structuralist authors have questioned the possibility of fixed meanings or stable structures in every text and presented a new idea of texts undermining the real meaning. Deconstruction has also emerged as a branch or relative school of thought associated with post-structuralism.

It was initiated by Jacques Derrida and aims to reveal how texts of literary works, be it any novel or poetry, undermine their own apparent meanings. This movement appeared as a challenge to traditional assumptions about language, truth, and interpretation.

Deconstructionism demonstrates that the texts can contain internal contradictions that resist definitive readings and expose the common viewpoint that the inherent stability of meaning is not always true.

Core Principles of Post-Structuralism & Deconstructionism:

• It questions the common notion of stable meanings available in questions and the possibility of fixed interpretations of literary works.
• Both approaches are focusing on exploring how texts undermine their own apparent meanings and cover the real idea behind the surface-level meaning.
• The word play and the difference between the use of language are the key highlights or ideas revolving around emphasizing its strategic use in works.
• Alike Structuralism, the idea of challenging the binary oppositions and hierarchies in prose is common among these schools of thought.
• It focuses on examining the contradictions and rhetorical uncertainty among the core meanings of words written in a book.

Key Concepts:

Differance: The idea of stable meanings in text and the possibility of definitive readings is challenged by Derrida’s concept of neologism. As it highlights how meaning is never fully present but constantly deferred through different chains of signifiers and signified, in turn making fixed interpretation impossible for the critics. 

The continuous deferral of meaning in language combines the notions of “difference” and “deferral” while analyzing works. 

Logocentrism: It is focused on debunking the misguided belief in stable, centered meaning available in language to access transcendental truth. On the other hand, Deconstructionists critique Western thought of privileging speech over written text amid the assumption that language can represent the reality of the whole work transparently.

Trace: The concept of tracing terms demonstrates how actual meaning is never self-contained in the words of the textbook but always contaminated by what it excludes or suppresses in it. It revolves around the idea of the absent presence of differing meanings in any term, as each word carries the meaning of all the terms it differs from in actuality.

Supplementarity: Founding fathers of both literary approaches are of the view that addition to a text can work as a supplement in completing or even displacing its meaning. It focuses on challenging the notions of textual wholeness and stability by modifying what they supposedly add to the text to complete or displace it. 

Major Contributors of Post-Structuralism & Deconstructionism:

• Jacques Derrida
• Paul de Man
• Barbara Johnson
• J. Hills Miller
• Geoffrey Hartman

Example:

You can consider Shakespeare’s famous deconstructionist play “The Merchant of Venice” to focus on how the play presents an undermining or reinforced antisemitic stereotypes. Use the above-mentioned ideas to highlight the contradictions in its treatment of mercy and justice by pinpointing the moments where the text deconstructs its own apparent moral framework.

Using George Orwell’s famous prose “Animal Farm” would be another perfect example of a post-structuralist and deconstructionist text, where you will find contextual contradictions even in the words of the author.

Psychoanalytic Criticism

Sigmund Freud laid the foundations of psychoanalytic criticism in the early 20th century by publishing his works concerning the unconscious motivations behind the actions of men. This theory focuses on human psychology to interpret the real meaning behind the words used in the works of different writers.

Psychoanalytic critics view actions or quotes of characters as psychological case studies to examine the unconscious conditions of the author, and draw a map to understand how it can engage the conscious thought process of the readers. 

This movement is focused on treating literary works as expressions of conscious and unconscious psychological forces, symbolic manifestations of desire, repression, and conflict present in a specific study. 

The whole school of thought is also motivated by Jacques Lacan’s works, like the “Mirror Stage in Destabilizing the Self,” to understand the connection between psychoanalysis, linguistics, and cultural frameworks to understand how language shapes subjectivity.

Core Principles of Psychoanalytic Criticism:

• This movement is focused on applying psychological elements to analyze the critical appreciation of any work written.
• Psychoanalytic critics are examining the unconscious forces at work behind the thought process of the author and conflicts in the text by identifying contradictory or opposing sentences.
• It analyzes symbolism not just as a literary technique but as an expression to communicate ideas of repressed communities in prose.
• This school of thought considers how literature reveals psychological processes behind the imprinting of words by the writer.
• The unique thing about this literary movement is its dealing with characters both psychologically and in terms of authority to some extent through the lens of a reader’s response psychology as well to reach the true layers of meaning.

Key Concepts:

Oedipal Complex: Characters of the novel or a prose are analyzed through oedipal complex ideas when they struggle to present their thoughts in front of authority figures. This concept highlights how protagonists often struggle with authority figures, as in the case of Sophocles’ The King in “Oedipus Rex”, to show familial dynamics and developmental challenges. 

This framework provides a deep understanding of the characters and narrative tensions between their relationships.

Unconscious Thoughts: Psychoanalytic critics examine how literary pieces give voices to the characters and present their thoughts. It focuses on viewing beneath the text to find expressions of desires that cannot be directly acknowledged in conscious thought processes. All in all, it is the study of the hidden emotions of human behavior and creative expression present in a work.

Functions of Id, ego, and superego: These components of the human psyche shape characters’ motivations and conflicts behind performing any action. Critics trace the internal struggles often presented as dramatized tensions between the instinctual drives of characters and their rational self or internalized set of social norms. Id, ego, and superego of the characters help people to understand the real motives behind their actions.

Defense Mechanisms: Psychoanalytic critics make sure to pinpoint the patterns like projection, denial, and sublimation in both character behavior and narrative techniques used in the text. It helps in revealing how the work under observation has managed the psychological threats to dominate the content.

Major Contributors of Psychoanalytic Criticism:

• Sigmund Freud
• Jacques Lacan
• Julia Kristeva
• Harold Bloom
• Peter Brooks

Example:

You can consider analyzing “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman as your essay writing assignment. You can conduct a psychoanalytic study of this read by interpreting the wallpaper pattern as a manifestation of the protagonist’s repressed desires and the creeping figure as her fragmented self in your research study.

The elements of psychoanalytic criticism help you explore how this specific text portrays psychological deterioration through symbolism and narrative technique.

Marxist Criticism

The “Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels has not only laid the basis of the economic movement, but also tilted towards the ideas of the left-wing people. It has brought a revolution in literary studies as well because critics have started viewing literary works as carriers of the ideas related to class struggles and economic repression.

The analysis of Karl Marx on “Capitalism” and how it perpetuates through the pens of even literary figures knowingly and unknowingly has made critics realize how literary works encode class relations, economic contradictions, and power dynamics, often revealing how prose simultaneously expresses and masks social realities.

This perspective has enabled scholars and even students to figure out the political dimensions, exploring how cultural productions can reinforce dominant ideologies or create space for resistance and critique without making the reader realize the agenda being pushed.

Core Principles of Marxist Criticism:

• It focuses on examining how literary pieces work in relation to economic and class structure struggles in promoting specific agendas through prose and poetry.
• Marxist criticism revolves around analyzing how a text reflects the ideological conditions of the society in which it is being written.
• This school of thought values the material conditions, like the socio-political situation of the society, which it reflects to reach the core meaning of the work.
• Scholars are intended to examine the representation of class conflict in literary pieces to relate to Marxist ideology.
• A major function of this literary movement is to critique how literature can work in reinforcing or challenging dominant ideologies of society.

Key Concepts:

Hegemony: This literary theory presents the idea that literature functions as part of the state apparatus that neutralizes existing power structures by presenting them as inevitable or universal rather than historically specific. It focuses on describing how dominant groups maintain their hegemony through manipulating cultural consent by promoting relevant literature rather than using force alone.

Alienation: Marxist critics analyze how literary texts portray the experience of alienation and critique or normalize the conversion of human beings and their relationships to commodity objects holding any exchange value. It highlights how capitalism has turned human relations into commodity relations.

Cultural Materialism: Scholars or critics associated with Marxist criticism emphasize analyzing texts within their historical and material contexts rather than treating them as timeless expressions of universal human values. This specific literary approach connects literary forms to the economic conditions that produced them.

Base and Superstructure: The relationship between the base and the economic arrangements of the society and the superstructure, the cultural and ideological formations, presents an overview of how economic conditions influence production or literature and reinforces or challenges existing economic relations.

Class Consciousness: It presents the idea that how literature can either awaken readers to relate with their class interests or perpetuate misconceptions, serving the agendas of the ruling class. Marxist critics examine how narratives either opposing or supporting the actual social conditions of the society are being pushed.

Major Contributors of Marxist Criticism:

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
• Georg Lukács
• Raymond Williams
• Terry Eagleton
• Fredric Jameson

Example:

Students who are looking for ideas to write their English literature assignments can consider Charles Dickens’ famous novel “Hard Times” and start highlighting the class struggle and inhuman aspects of capitalism to show the tension between factory owners and the labour class.

You can highlight aspects advocating how Dickens critiques bourgeois ideology through his narrative resolution in this novel to show Marxist elements.

Feminism

Feminism emerged as a literary tradition from women’s political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on examining how gender roles and representation are shaping literary content creation and reception through different works. This specific approach is only aiming at understanding how literature reflects, reinforces, or challenges patriarchal values and representations, promoting a special agenda.

Early critics who have joined this movement worked on identifying the works of neglected women writers and identified similar sexist patterns in the orthodox literature available. Further, this school of thought expanded to explore how gender intersects with race, class, sexuality, and the evil colonialism of the 20th century.

It makes the critics focus on analyzing how language itself encodes gender assumptions or stereotypical roles in works.

Core Principles of Feminism:

• It is concerned with examining the gender roles and their stereotypical representations in different literary pieces.
• This literary movement analyzes how patriarchal structures are well-knit in old works and shape new literary traditions.
• The prime mission of this thesis is to recover and promote the hidden writings of women.
• The main focus of feminism is to evaluate female experiences and perspectives in texts from modern day and even from old times.
• Feminist critics are encouraging the idea of challenging gender biases in literary interpretation of texts.

Key Concepts:

Patriarchal Cannons: Feminism is focused on analyzing or identifying the patriarchal cannons through which gender biased literature gets promoted and how critical standards play their part in promoting masculine values encoded in texts or universal principles. It has prioritized the focus on marginalized voices of women suppressed under the patriarchal perspectives.

Gender Construction: Feminist theorists have focused on presenting gender as a social construction to emphasize how literary works both reflect and help create culturally specific notions of masculinity and femininity. The idea of biological determinism, as floated by Charles Darwin, allows critics to analyze how texts take part in setting gender norms that appear natural but are historically designed.

The Male Gaze: It is a feminist narrative of analyzing how often assumed as a male viewer and a female object, influences characterization, description, and even plot development of the novel. It is concerned with how women are viewed as objects of glorification due to the male gaze narrative.

Écriture féminine: Feminine writing is concerned with exploring possibilities for distinctively female textual expression that challenges patriarchal linguistic structures. To show how women’s bodily experiences and cultural positioning might generate alternative narrative forms and linguistic innovations.

Major Contributors to Feminism:

• Virginia Woolf
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Simone de Beauvoir
• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
• Elaine Showalter
• Judith Butler

Example:

You can consider the writings of Colleen Hoover, like “November”, “It Ends With Us”, “It Starts With Us”, and similar ones of other feminist writers to conduct a research study for your dissertation writing task.

You can highlight how women are being suppressed or manipulated in a patriarchal society and the negative effects of gender based inequalities to resonate with the themes of feminism.

Reader-Response Theory

Reader-response theory emerged in the 1970s as a negation of the idea that meaning can only be deduced from the text, not from external factors. This literary approach has shifted the analytical attention from the work to the response of the reader dealing with it. It focuses on examining how meaning emerges through the reading process itself.

Reader-response critics argue that the readers can actively construct the meaning through their engagement with literature, and there’s no need to observe the text minutely in order to get to the message of the prose. 

They focus on analyzing how texts guide readers’ interpretations, how readers bring their own experiences to texts, and how interpretive communities play their role in shaping reading practices, aiming to extract the meaning. 

This reader-centered perspective highlights the dynamic, interactive nature of reading, treating interpretation as a transaction between text and reader rather than the uncovering of fixed textual meaning placed in the prose. 

This movement has totally shifted the mechanism of analyzing the text to get to its real meaning by making the reader a prime player in dealing with it. 

Core Principles of Reader-Response Theory:

• It emphasizes the focus on the role of the reader in dealing with a text in creating the responsive meaning of it.
• Reader-response theory keeps an eye on the interaction between the text and the reader to help scholars find the core meaning of any literary work as perceived by the audience.
• This school of thought encourages different viewpoints and openly considers how different readers construct different interpretations of the same book.
• Critics are aiming at the analysis of the reading process itself to determine the factors playing their role in making the wholesome meaning of a text.

Key Concepts:

Textual Strategies: This concept is focused on analyzing how literary works create positions for readers to occupy by design. They make the reader guide their responses through various textual strategies that anticipate certain kinds of engagement and help them construct the meaning of the text by connecting the dots.

Interpretive Communities: Reader-response theory promotes the idea of determining how different readers approach the same texts and share similar assumptions. It focuses on explaining why readers from different social or cultural backgrounds reach similar kinds of meanings, which tend towards social factors rather than individual ideas.

Changing Horizons of Expectations: The frameworks of this literary theory is centered around how readers encounter new works and help explain how meanings change as works are observed or mainly read in different historical moments. It is mainly concerned with the cultural and literary expectations that readers bring to texts based on their prior reading experience and already determined historical context.

Active Creation of Readers: The possible gaps in the meaning or sentence layering of literary works and missing information allow the readers to take an active part in the process of co-creation rather than just being passive, receptive individuals. These gaps in the text make the readers participate in meaning-building and interpreting the text based on their response.

Major Contributors of Reader-Response Theory:

• Wolfgang Iser
• Hans Robert Jauss
• Stanley Fish
• Louise Rosenblatt
• Norman Holland

Example:

You can bring Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” under observation and highlight how the unreliable narrator creates uncertainty for readers and how the ambiguities in the text invite the reader’s participation to judge meaning in your research study.

Make sure to discuss how different readers’ cultural backgrounds might lead them to perceive varying interpretations of the narrator’s dealing with the same prose.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: What is a Literary Theory?

Literary theory is a systematic framework used to study the nature of literary works under observation, including their methods, structures, and interpretive frameworks.

Q2: What’s the difference between literary theory and criticism?

Literary theory is the foundational idea that critics use to do literary criticism of any work by analyzing its text based on the observations presented in the theory.

Q3: What are the post-modern literary theories?

There are several post-modern literary theories, but we’ll mention the most important ones for you to adopt and conduct literary criticism. Some famous post-modern literary theories are New Historicism, Ecocriticism, Queer, Meta fiction, and so on.