Literary criticism and theory

In short

Literary criticism is the reasoned description, interpretation and evaluation of literary texts; literary theory is the body of concepts and assumptions about language, meaning, authorship and value on which such criticism rests. The subject runs from Plato and Aristotle through Sanskrit poetics to twentieth-century formalism, structuralism, poststructuralism and the political criticisms (Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, Dalit, eco). It carries the heaviest marks in BA and MA English papers titled "Literary Criticism", "Critical Theory" or "Western Aesthetics" under UGC CBCS and the National Education Policy four-year framework, and it is Unit VI (Literary Theory and Criticism) of the UGC NET/JRF English syllabus. In campus recruitment it matters indirectly but really: content, editorial, publishing, EdTech, policy-research and teaching roles test argument, close reading and the ability to defend a reading with evidence.

Explained

Classical and Roman foundations

• Plato (*Republic*, Book X; *Ion*): art is *mimesis* (imitation) of a world already a copy of the Ideas, so it is twice removed from truth; poets stir the passions and are banished from the ideal state except hymns to the gods. Poetry works by divine madness, not craft.
• Aristotle (*Poetics*, c. 335 BCE): the first systematic defence. Poetry imitates not what happened but what *may* happen, so it is "more philosophical than history". Six parts of tragedy in order: plot (*mythos*), character (*ethos*), thought (*dianoia*), diction (*lexis*), song (*melopoeia*), spectacle (*opsis*) - plot is the soul of tragedy.
• Key Aristotelian terms: *hamartia* (error of judgement, not "tragic flaw" in the moralised sense), *peripeteia* (reversal), *anagnorisis* (recognition), *catharsis* (purgation or clarification of pity and fear), unity of action, the tragic hero as better than average but not perfect, *hubris*.
• Horace (*Ars Poetica*): practical, prescriptive advice - poetry should be *dulce et utile* (sweet and useful); decorum, consistency of character, nine years' revision, *in medias res*; the poet as craftsman.
• Longinus (*On the Sublime*, 1st c. CE): shifts attention from rules to effect - the sublime is "the echo of a great soul". Five sources: grandeur of thought, strong emotion, figures of speech, noble diction, dignified composition. Marks the beginning of appreciative, affective criticism.
• Indian classical poetics (examined in most Indian syllabi alongside the Greeks): Bharata's *Natyashastra* (rasa theory - eight, later nine, rasas with *bhavas* as their causes; *rasa-sutra*: vibhava + anubhava + vyabhicharibhava produce rasa); Bharata's *abhinaya*; Bhamaha and Dandin on *alamkara* (figuration); Vamana on *riti* (style); Anandavardhana's *Dhvanyaloka* on *dhvani* (suggestion as the soul of poetry); Abhinavagupta's *Abhinavabharati* (rasa as *sadharanikarana*, universalisation); Kuntaka's *vakrokti* (oblique expression); Kshemendra and Mahimabhatta on *aucitya* (propriety) and *anumana*.

Renaissance to Romantic English criticism

• Sir Philip Sidney, *An Apology for Poetry* (1595): reply to Stephen Gosson's *School of Abuse*; the poet "nothing affirms, therefore never lieth"; poetry teaches and delights better than history or philosophy; defends the "golden world" the poet creates.
• John Dryden, *An Essay of Dramatic Poesy* (1668): dialogue among Crites, Eugenius, Lisideius and Neander; compares ancients with moderns, French with English drama, rhyme with blank verse; defends Shakespeare ("the largest and most comprehensive soul") and the English violation of the unities. Called "the father of English criticism" by Samuel Johnson.
• Alexander Pope, *An Essay on Criticism*: neoclassical doctrine in verse - "follow Nature", nature "methodised" is the ancients' rules, "a little learning is a dangerous thing".
• Samuel Johnson: *Preface to Shakespeare* (1765) - Shakespeare the poet of nature; defends mixed tragicomedy and the breach of unities since "the drama's laws the drama's patrons give"; faults Shakespeare for careless plots and quibbles. *Lives of the Poets* - judicial criticism, the common reader as final arbiter.
• Wordsworth, *Preface to Lyrical Ballads* (1800/1802): poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"; recollected in tranquillity; language really used by men; rustic life as subject; rejects the neoclassical diction; poet as "a man speaking to men". The Romantic turn from imitation to expression.
• Coleridge, *Biographia Literaria* (1817): distinguishes imagination from fancy; primary imagination (the ordinary perceiving power) from secondary imagination (conscious, dissolving and recreating, "esemplastic"); fancy merely aggregates fixities. Also "willing suspension of disbelief", organic unity, and the critique of Wordsworth's language theory.
• Shelley, *A Defence of Poetry*: poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world"; imagination as the moral instrument.
• Keats: "negative capability" - remaining in uncertainties without irritable reaching after fact.

Nineteenth and early twentieth century: from culture to the text

• Matthew Arnold: criticism as "a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world"; the touchstone method (compare lines of the great masters to judge others); "high seriousness"; poetry as a criticism of life that will replace religion; *The Study of Poetry*, *The Function of Criticism at the Present Time*.
• Henry James, *The Art of Fiction*: the novel as an organic form; "a novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life".
• T. S. Eliot: *Tradition and the Individual Talent* (1919) - tradition as a simultaneous order altered by every new work; the impersonal theory of poetry (the poet as catalyst, poetry as "escape from personality"); "dissociation of sensibility" located in the seventeenth century; objective correlative (*Hamlet and His Problems*); *The Metaphysical Poets*.
• I. A. Richards: *Principles of Literary Criticism*, *Practical Criticism* - psychological theory of value as organisation of impulses; the Cambridge experiment in anonymous close reading; stock responses; four kinds of meaning (sense, feeling, tone, intention); tenor and vehicle in metaphor (*The Philosophy of Rhetoric*).
• New Criticism (Ransom, Brooks, Wimsatt, Beardsley, Tate, Empson in part): the poem is a self-sufficient verbal artefact; close reading of irony, paradox, ambiguity, tension; intentional fallacy (the author's intention is neither available nor decisive) and affective fallacy (the reader's response is not the poem); the heresy of paraphrase (Brooks - a poem's meaning cannot be restated in prose); Wimsatt's "concrete universal".
• Russian Formalism (Shklovsky, Eichenbaum, Jakobson, Tomashevsky): literature as a system of devices; defamiliarisation (*ostranenie*) - art makes the stone stony by making perception difficult; *fabula* (story) versus *syuzhet* (plot); the literariness of language; Propp's thirty-one narrative functions in the folktale; Jakobson's six functions of communication and the poetic function (focus on the message for its own sake), with the metaphoric and metonymic axes.
• Bakhtin: dialogism, polyphony, heteroglossia, the carnivalesque; the novel as the genre of many voices against the monologic epic.

Structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction

• Saussure's linguistics as the base: *langue* (system) versus *parole* (utterance); the sign as signifier + signified; meaning is arbitrary, differential and relational; synchronic over diachronic study.
• Structuralism (Lévi-Strauss on myth, Barthes's *Mythologies* and *S/Z*, Genette's narratology, Todorov, Greimas's actantial model): the search for the underlying system - binary oppositions, codes, deep structure - rather than the unique meaning of a work. Barthes's *The Death of the Author* (1968) transfers authority from author to reader and from "work" to "text"; readerly (*lisible*) versus writerly (*scriptible*) texts.
• Genette's narratology (useful for novel questions but kept here as theory): order (anachrony - flashback/*analepsis*, flashforward/*prolepsis*), duration, frequency, mood (focalisation), voice (homodiegetic/heterodiegetic narrator).
• Deconstruction (Derrida: *Of Grammatology*, *Writing and Difference*): attacks logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence; speech has no priority over writing; *différance* (difference plus deferral) means the signified is endlessly postponed; "there is no outside-text" (*il n'y a pas de hors-texte*); the trace, supplement, aporia; the method is to locate the hierarchical binary, reverse it, then displace it. Yale critics: Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom (*The Anxiety of Influence*, misreading, the six revisionary ratios).
• Michel Foucault: discourse, power/knowledge, the archive, genealogy, panopticism; *What Is an Author?* - the author-function as a classificatory principle, not a person. Basis for New Historicism (Greenblatt - "cultural poetics", the text as one among many circulating discourses) and Cultural Materialism (Raymond Williams, Dollimore, Sinfield).
• Psychoanalytic criticism: Freud (the unconscious, condensation and displacement, Oedipus complex, the uncanny, "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming", sublimation); Ernest Jones on *Hamlet*; Jung's archetypes and collective unconscious; Lacan (the mirror stage, the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real, "the unconscious is structured like a language", desire as lack, the Name-of-the-Father).

Political and identity criticisms

• Marxist criticism: base and superstructure; literature as ideology and as a product of material conditions; Marx and Engels on realism and Balzac; Lukács on critical realism and reification; Gramsci's hegemony and the organic intellectual; Althusser's ideology as "interpellation" and ideological state apparatuses; Raymond Williams's dominant/residual/emergent and "structures of feeling"; Terry Eagleton (*Marxism and Literary Criticism*, *Literary Theory: An Introduction*); Jameson on postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism; the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and the aura).
• Feminist criticism: Woolf's *A Room of One's Own* (material conditions, the androgynous mind); Beauvoir's *The Second Sex* ("one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman"; woman as Other); Elaine Showalter's gynocriticism and the feminine-feminist-female phases; Gilbert and Gubar's *The Madwoman in the Attic*; Kate Millett's *Sexual Politics*; Ellmann's *Thinking About Women*; French feminism - Kristeva (semiotic/symbolic, *abject*), Cixous (*écriture féminine*, "The Laugh of the Medusa"), Irigaray; Judith Butler's performativity and the sex/gender distinction; Indian feminist criticism - Susie Tharu and K. Lalita's *Women Writing in India*, the Stree/Zubaan/Kali for Women archive.
• Postcolonial criticism: Frantz Fanon (*Black Skin, White Masks*, *The Wretched of the Earth* - colonised psyche, national culture); Edward Said's *Orientalism* (1978) - the Orient as a Western discursive construction, with latent and manifest Orientalism; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - "Can the Subaltern Speak?", strategic essentialism, epistemic violence; Homi Bhabha - hybridity, mimicry, the third space, ambivalence; Ngugi wa Thiong'o's *Decolonising the Mind* (language); Ashis Nandy's *The Intimate Enemy*; Subaltern Studies (Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee); writing back and canon revision.
• Dalit and Bahujan aesthetics (now a standard unit in Indian syllabi): Sharankumar Limbale's *Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature* (the triad of *dukkha*, authenticity and *vidroha*/rebellion; experience over imagination); Ambedkar's thought as a critical frame; Omprakash Valmiki, Baburao Bagul; *testimonio* and autobiography as the central Dalit form; critique of brahminical rasa aesthetics.
• Reader-response and reception: I. A. Richards's groundwork; Wolfgang Iser's implied reader and the gaps/indeterminacies the reader fills; Hans Robert Jauss's horizon of expectations; Stanley Fish's affective stylistics and interpretive communities; Umberto Eco's open work.
• Later movements: postmodernism (Lyotard's incredulity towards metanarratives, Baudrillard's simulacra and hyperreality, pastiche, intertextuality after Kristeva); queer theory (Foucault, Sedgwick's *Epistemology of the Closet*, Butler); ecocriticism (Cheryll Glotfelty, Lawrence Buell; in India, environmental humanities readings of Amitav Ghosh's *The Great Derangement*, Mahasweta Devi, Ghosh's *The Hungry Tide*); disability studies; digital humanities and distant reading (Franco Moretti); world literature debates (Damrosch).

How criticism is classified and how it is practised

• By function: theoretical (principles), practical/applied (reading a particular text), descriptive, prescriptive (Horace, Pope), judicial (Johnson, Arnold), inductive (built from the text up), comparative, textual/editorial, historical/biographical.
• By focus (a reliable examination frame, after M. H. Abrams's four coordinates in *The Mirror and the Lamp*): mimetic (text and world - Plato, Aristotle, Marxist realism), pragmatic (text and audience - Horace, Sidney, reader-response), expressive (text and author - Wordsworth, Romantic and psychoanalytic), objective (text in itself - New Criticism, Formalism).
• Steps in writing a critical essay - the method examiners reward: (1) read closely and note formal features; (2) frame a specific, arguable thesis; (3) choose a declared theoretical lens and define its terms; (4) select textual evidence, quoted exactly with line or page references; (5) analyse the evidence rather than paraphrasing the plot; (6) engage one or two counter-readings from published criticism; (7) conclude with the significance of the reading; (8) reference in MLA 9th edition (the standard for most Indian English departments; some use APA 7th).
• Advantages and limitations in brief: formalist approaches give rigour and teach close reading but ignore history and the reader; historical and political approaches restore context but can reduce art to document; psychoanalytic reading is suggestive but unfalsifiable; deconstruction exposes hidden hierarchies but is charged with interpretive nihilism; reader-response honours the actual act of reading but risks relativism.
• Indian institutional context: UGC NET English Paper II Unit VI is literary theory and criticism; central-university MA entrance tests (CUET-PG English) cover the same ground; the Sahitya Akademi publishes comparative Indian criticism; plagiarism in theory essays is governed by the UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2018, with defined similarity bands and penalties; quotation for criticism and review is permitted as fair dealing under Section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957.

Key points

• Mimesis - imitation; for Plato a defect of art, for Aristotle its creative principle representing the probable.
• Catharsis - the purging or clarifying of pity and fear that tragedy produces in the audience (*Poetics*, Ch. 6).
• Hamartia - the hero's error or miscalculation, not necessarily a moral flaw.
• The sublime - Longinus's transport produced by great thought and noble expression, measured by effect, not rules.
• Rasa - the aesthetic relish produced in the spectator; *dhvani* (Anandavardhana) is suggestion as poetry's soul.
• Imagination vs fancy - Coleridge: imagination fuses and recreates (esemplastic), fancy only rearranges fixed images.
• Touchstone method - Arnold's comparison of passages with lines from the great masters to judge poetic worth.
• Objective correlative - Eliot's set of objects or situations that is the exact formula for a particular emotion.
• Dissociation of sensibility - Eliot's claim that thought and feeling split apart in English poetry after the Metaphysicals.
• Intentional and affective fallacies - Wimsatt and Beardsley: neither the author's purpose nor the reader's feeling settles a poem's meaning.
• Defamiliarisation - Shklovsky's *ostranenie*; art renews perception by making the familiar strange.
• Langue/parole and the arbitrary sign - Saussure's base for all structuralism; meaning arises from difference within a system.
• Death of the Author - Barthes: meaning is made at the destination (the reader), not the origin.
• Différance - Derrida's difference-and-deferral; no final signified, so meaning is never fully present.
• Hegemony and interpellation - Gramsci's rule by consent; Althusser's ideology hailing the subject.
• Gynocriticism - Showalter's study of women's writing as its own tradition, in feminine, feminist and female phases.
• Orientalism, hybridity, subaltern - Said's constructed East, Bhabha's in-between cultural identity, Spivak's question of who may speak.
• Dalit aesthetics - Limbale's *dukkha*, authenticity and rebellion; lived experience displaces classical rasa as the criterion.

Examples

*(The topic has no formulas; these are solved critical cases of the kind set in examinations.)*

Case 1 - Apply Aristotle to a tragedy. Question: Is Shakespeare's *Macbeth* an Aristotelian tragedy? Step 1, test plot: single action (the murder and its consequences), with *peripeteia* at Banquo's ghost/Birnam Wood and *anagnorisis* in "a tale told by an idiot". Step 2, test hero: noble, "brave Macbeth", above average, destroyed by *hamartia* (ambition believed credulously) and *hubris*. Step 3, test catharsis: pity for a man who knows his own damnation, fear of the ease of his fall. Step 4, note deviations: no unity of time or place; comic relief (the Porter); a supernatural machinery Aristotle did not provide for. Conclusion: Aristotelian in plot-logic and tragic effect, un-Aristotelian in the unities - which is exactly Johnson's and Dryden's defence of English drama.

Case 2 - Four approaches to one text. Charlotte Brontë's *Jane Eyre*, read four ways:

Case 3 - Deconstruct a binary. Take the opposition speech/writing in a text that praises the living voice. Step 1, identify the hierarchy (speech = presence, truth; writing = absence, derivative). Step 2, reverse it: show that the text's authority depends on its own written form and on citation, so "writing" is the condition of the speech it privileges. Step 3, displace: both terms are effects of *différance*, so the hierarchy collapses rather than inverting permanently. The result is an *aporia*, not a new thesis - the usual examination error is to stop at step 2.

Case 4 - Rasa analysis of a poem. Apply the *rasa-sutra* to the Ramayana's Sita-in-exile episodes. *Vibhava*: the separation and the forest (*alambana* - Rama; *uddipana* - the barren setting). *Anubhava*: weeping, trembling, speech breaking off. *Vyabhicharibhava*: anxiety, despondency, memory. Dominant *sthayibhava* is *shoka* (sorrow), yielding karuna rasa. By Abhinavagupta, the sorrow is universalised (*sadharanikarana*) and so becomes pleasurable to the reader rather than painful - the standard answer to the objection "why do we enjoy a tragedy?".

Case 5 - Choose the right lens. Mulk Raj Anand's *Untouchable*: a Marxist reading finds Bakha's caste oppression inseparable from the material relations of the outcaste colony and the sweeper's labour; a Dalit-aesthetic reading (Limbale) questions the authority of a non-Dalit, upper-caste narrator representing that experience and prefers the *swanubhav* (self-experience) of Valmiki's *Joothan*. Both are defensible in the examination if the criterion is stated; the weak answer is one that simply narrates the day in Bakha's life.

Where it is used

• Teaching and academia: assistant professor posts via UGC NET/JRF and university entrance; theory is the distinguishing unit between a BA pass and a strong postgraduate application.
• Publishing and editorial: Penguin Random House India, HarperCollins India, Rupa, Orient BlackSwan, Oxford University Press India, Zubaan, Navayana - manuscript assessment, commissioning notes and blurb-writing use evaluative critical vocabulary daily.
• Content, UX writing and EdTech: BYJU'S, Unacademy, Vedantu and Toppr hire English graduates to build literature modules; the ability to frame a thesis and support it with evidence is what the writing test measures.
• Journalism and cultural criticism: book-review and arts pages of *The Hindu*, *Indian Express*, *Scroll*, *The Caravan*, *Frontline*; translation review for the Sahitya Akademi and JCB Prize juries.
• Policy, research and development communication: discourse analysis and postcolonial/subaltern frames in gender, caste and media research at think-tanks, CSDS, NCERT textbook review and UNICEF-type communication roles.
• Law, civil services and management entrances: UPSC English Literature optional (Papers I and II include criticism and theory); reading comprehension and critical-reasoning sections of CAT, CLAT and bank examinations reward trained close reading.

Interview questions

• Q: What is the difference between literary criticism and literary theory? A: Criticism is the interpretation and evaluation of particular texts; theory is the set of general assumptions about language, meaning and value that makes a given kind of criticism possible.
• Q: How does Aristotle answer Plato's charge against poetry? A: By arguing that imitation is natural and instructive, that poetry deals with the probable and universal rather than the merely factual, and that tragedy's emotions are purged through catharsis instead of being inflamed.
• Q: What exactly is catharsis, and why is it disputed? A: It is the effect of tragedy on pity and fear in *Poetics* Ch. 6; Aristotle never defines it, so it has been read medically as purgation, morally as purification and intellectually as clarification.
• Q: Distinguish Coleridge's imagination from fancy. A: Imagination is the esemplastic power that dissolves and recreates experience into an organic whole - primary in all perception, secondary in the poet; fancy only aggregates fixed images in new arrangements.
• Q: What does Eliot mean by "tradition"? A: Not inherited reverence but a simultaneous order of all existing works that a genuinely new work alters, which the poet acquires by labour and historical sense.
• Q: State the intentional and affective fallacies, and the main objection to them. A: That a work's meaning cannot be settled by the author's intention or the reader's emotional response; critics object that both fallacies strip away context and real readers, which is what reader-response and historicist criticism restored.
• Q: Explain defamiliarisation with an example. A: Shklovsky's claim that art renews perception by making the habitual strange - Tolstoy describing a flogging or an opera as if seen for the first time forces the reader to perceive rather than recognise.
• Q: What is the significance of Saussure for literary theory? A: His arbitrary, differential sign and *langue/parole* distinction moved meaning from reference to system, which structuralism applied to narrative and myth and poststructuralism then turned against itself.
• Q: Does deconstruction mean a text can mean anything? A: No - it shows that a text's meaning cannot be closed because of *différance*, but the reading must still be anchored in that text's own language and demonstrated hierarchies.
• Q: Summarise Said's *Orientalism* in two sentences. A: The West produced "the Orient" as a body of knowledge serving imperial power, so Oriental studies describe a construction rather than a place. Said draws on Foucault's discourse and Gramsci's hegemony to show that the representation preceded and justified the rule.
• Q: What does Spivak mean by asking whether the subaltern can speak? A: That the subaltern's speech has no position in the dominant discourse from which it can be heard, so even sympathetic intellectuals risk re-silencing her while claiming to represent her.
• Q: How does Dalit aesthetics challenge classical Indian poetics? A: It replaces rasa's ideal of detached, universalised relish with lived experience, authenticity and rebellion, treating autobiography and testimony as primary forms and questioning who has standing to represent Dalit life.

Common mistakes

• Retelling the plot or summarising a critic's essay instead of arguing a thesis - the single commonest cause of low marks in criticism papers.
• Mixing up *hamartia* with a moral flaw, or calling every unhappy ending a tragedy without testing it against the *Poetics*.
• Attributing New Critical ideas to Russian Formalists (or vice versa), and confusing Richards's *Practical Criticism* with Wimsatt's fallacies.
• Treating structuralism and poststructuralism as the same thing, or supposing deconstruction simply inverts a binary and stops there.
• Using theory as decoration - naming Derrida, Bhabha or Lacan without defining the term used or applying it to a quoted passage.
• Quoting wrongly or from memory: titles, dates and exact wording of famous phrases carry marks, and misattribution (for example "unacknowledged legislators" to Wordsworth rather than Shelley) is heavily penalised.
• Ignoring Indian poetics and Dalit/postcolonial units because they appear last in the syllabus, when they are the easiest sections in which to write a distinctive answer.

Related topics

History of English literature · Poetry: forms and analysis · Drama: Shakespeare and modern drama · The novel · Indian writing in English · Comparative literature and translation studies