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literary criticism also called (jocularly, and chiefly in academic contexts) lit critA discipline concerned with a range of enquiries about literature: criticism asks what literature is, what it does, and what it is worth.
The Western critical tradition began with Plato in the 4th century
BC. In the Republic he attacked the poets on two
fronts: their art is merely imitative, and it appeals to the worst rather
than to the best in human nature. A generation later Aristotle, in his
Poetics, countered these charges and developed a set of principles
of composition that were of lasting importance to European literature. As
late as 1674 Nicolas Boileau was still, in L'Art poétique,
recommending observance of the Aristotelian rules
or unitiesof time, action, and place.
European literary criticism from the Renaissance onward has for the
most part focused on the same two issues: the moral worth of literature
and the nature of its relationship to reality. At the end of the 16th
century Sir Philip Sidney argued in The Defence of Poesie that it
is the special property of literature to express moral and philosophical
truths in a way that rescues them from abstraction and makes them
immediately graspable. A century later, John Dryden, in Of Dramatick
Poesie, An Essay (1668), put forward the less idealistic view that the
business of literature is primarily to offer an accurate representation of
the world 
for the delight and instruction of mankind.
This remains the assumption of the great critical
works of 18th
century England, underlying both Alexander Pope's
An Essay on Criticism (1711) and the extensive work of Samuel
Johnson.
William Wordsworth's assertion in his Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical
Ballads(1800) that the object of poetry is truth . . . carried alive into the heart by
passion marks a significant change from the ideas of the
mid18th century. Other important statements of critical
theory in the Romantic period were Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia
Literaria (1817) and Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defence of Poetry
(written 1821). The later 19th century saw a development in one direction
toward an aesthetic theory of art for art's sake and in another direction
toward the view, expressed by Matthew Arnold, that the cultural role of
literature should be to take over the sort of moral and philosophical
functions that had previously been fulfilled by religion.
The volume of literary criticism increased greatly in the 20th century.
An early example of this in the Englishspeaking world was I.A. Richards' Principles of
Literary Criticism (1924), which became influential as the basis of
Practical Criticism. From this developed the New Criticism of the 1940s
and '50s, which was associated with such American critics as John Crowe
Ransom and Cleanth Brooks. The premise of the New Critics, that a work of
literature should be studied as a separate and selfcontained entity, set them in opposition both to
biographical criticism and to those schools of criticismMarxist, psychoanalytical, historical, and the
likethat set out to examine literature from perspectives
external to the text.
The late 20th century witnessed a radical reappraisal of traditional
modes of literary criticism. Building on the work of the Russian Formalist
critics of the 1920s and the examinations of linguistic structure carried
out by the Swiss philologist Ferdinand de Saussure, literary theorists
began to call into question the overriding importance of the concept of
the author as the source of the text's meaning. Structuralist
and poststructuralist critics, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida
of France, instead directed attention toward the ways in which meaning is
created by the determining structures of language and culture. See
also Chicago critics; deconstruction;
feminist criticism; Formalism;
Freudian criticism; GENEVA SCHOOL OF criticism
; Marxist criticism; New Criticism;
new historicism; poststructuralism;
practical criticism; readerresponse criticism; structuralism
.
Source: Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature (c)1995. Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. Published under license with Merriam-Webster.
Source Database: Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature