text:
Transport economics

Transport economics is a branch of economics founded in 1959 by American economist John R. Meyer that deals with the allocation of resources within the transport sector. It has strong links to civil engineering. Transport economics differs from some other branches of economics in that the assumption of a spaceless, instantaneous economy does not hold. People and goods flow over networks at certain speeds. Demands peak. Advance ticket purchase is often induced by lower fares. The networks themselves may or may not be competitive. A single trip (the final good, in the consumer's eyes) may require the bundling of services provided by several firms, agencies and modes.

Although transport systems follow the same supply and demand theory as other industries, the complications of network effects and choices between dissimilar goods (e.g. car and bus travel) make estimating the demand for transportation facilities difficult. The development of models to estimate the likely choices between the goods involved in transport decisions (discrete choice models) led to the development of an important branch of econometrics, as well as a Nobel Prize for Daniel McFadden.

In transport, demand can be measured in number of journeys made or in total distance traveled across all journeys (e.g. passenger-kilometers for public transport or vehicle-kilometers of travel (VKT) for private transport). Supply is considered to be a measure of capacity. The price of the good (travel) is measured using the generalised cost of travel, which includes both money and time expenditure.

The effect of increases in supply (i.e. capacity) are of particular interest in transport economics (see induced demand), as the potential environmental consequences are significant (see externalities below).

Externalities
In addition to providing benefits to their users, transport networks impose both positive and negative externalities on non-users. The consideration of these externalities – particularly the negative ones – is a part of transport economics.

Positive externalities of transport networks may include the ability to provide emergency services, increases in land value, and agglomeration benefits. Negative externalities are wide-ranging and may include local air pollution, noise pollution, light pollution, safety hazards, community severance and congestion. The contribution of transport systems to potentially hazardous climate change is a significant negative externality which is difficult to evaluate quantitatively, making it difficult (but not impossible) to include in transport economics-based research and analysis.

Congestion is considered a negative externality by economists. An externality occurs when a transaction causes costs or benefits to third party, often, although not necessarily, from the use of a public good. For example, manufacturing or transportation cause air pollution imposing costs on others when making use of public air.

Traffic congestion

Traffic congestion is a negative externality caused by various factors. A 2005 American study stated that there are seven root causes of congestion, and gives the following summary of their contributions: bottlenecks 40%, traffic incidents 25%, bad weather 15%, work zones 10%, poor signal timing 5%, and special events/other 5%. Within the transport economics community, congestion pricing is considered to be an appropriate mechanism to deal with this problem (i.e. to internalise the externality) by allocating scarce roadway capacity to users. Capacity expansion is also a potential mechanism to deal with traffic congestion, but is often undesirable (particularly in urban areas) and sometimes has questionable benefits (see induced demand). William Vickrey, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for his work on "moral hazard", is considered one of the fathers of congestion pricing, as he first proposed it for the New York City Subway in 1952. In the road transportation arena these theories were extended by Maurice Allais, a fellow Nobel prize winner "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources", Gabriel Roth who was instrumental in the first designs and upon whose World Bank recommendation the first system was put in place in Singapore. Reuben Smeed, the deputy director of the Transport and Road Research Laboratory was also a pioneer in this field, and his ideas were presented to the British government in what is known as the Smeed Report.

Congestion is not limited to road networks; the negative externality imposed by congestion is also important in busy public transport networks as well as crowded pedestrian areas, e.g. on the London Underground on a weekday or any urban train station, at peak times. There is the classical excess in demand compared to supply. This is because at peak times there is a large demand for trains, since people want to go home (i.e., a derived demand). However, space on the platforms and on the trains is limited and small compared to the demand for it. As a result, there are crowds of people outside the train doors and in the train station corridors. This increases delays for commuters, which can often cause a rise in stress or other problems.

Congestion pricing

Congestion pricing is an efficiency pricing strategy that requires the users to pay more for that public good, thus increasing the welfare gain or net benefit for society. Congestion pricing is one of a number of alternative demand side (as opposed to supply side) strategies offered by economists to address congestion. Congestion pricing was first implemented in Singapore in 1975, together with a comprehensive package of road pricing measures, stringent car ownership rules and improvements in mass transit. Thanks to technological advances in electronic toll collection, Singapore upgraded its system in 1998 (see Singapore's Electronic Road Pricing). Similar pricing schemes were implemented in Rome in 2001, as an upgrade to the manual zone control system implemented in 1998; London in 2003 and extended in 2007 (see London congestion charge); Stockholm in 2006, as seven-month trial, and then on a permanent basis since August 2007 (see Stockholm congestion tax).

Pollution pricing
From 2008 to 2011, Milan had a traffic charge scheme, Ecopass, that exempted higher emission standard vehicles (Euro IV) and other alternative fuel vehicles  This was later replaced by a more conventional congestion pricing scheme, Area C.

Even the transport economists who advocate congestion pricing have anticipated several practical limitations, concerns and controversial issues regarding the actual implementation of this policy. As summarized by noted regional planner Robert Cervero: "True social-cost pricing of metropolitan travel has proven to be a theoretical ideal that so far has eluded real-world implementation. The primary obstacle is that except for professors of transportation economics and a cadre of vocal environmentalists, few people are in favor of considerably higher charges for peak-period travel. Middle-class motorists often complain they already pay too much in gasoline taxes and registration fees to drive their cars, and that to pay more during congested periods would add insult to injury. In the United States, few politicians are willing to champion the cause of congestion pricing in fear of reprisal from their constituents... Critics also argue that charging more to drive is elitist policy, pricing the poor off of roads so that the wealthy can move about unencumbered. It is for all these reasons that peak-period pricing remains a pipe dream in the minds of many."

Road space rationing

Transport economists consider road space rationing an alternative to congestion pricing, but road space rationing is considered more equitable, as the restrictions force all drivers to reduce auto travel, while congestion pricing restrains less those who can afford paying the congestion charge. Nevertheless, high-income users can avoid the restrictions by owning a second car. Moreover, congestion pricing (unlike rationing) acts "to allocate a scarce resource to its most valuable use, as evinced by users' willingness to pay for the resource". While some "opponents of congestion pricing fear that tolled roads will be used only by people with high income. But preliminary evidence suggests that the new toll lanes in California are used by people of all income groups. The ability to get somewhere fast and reliably is valued in a variety of circumstances. Not everyone will need or want to incur a toll on a daily basis, but on occasions when getting somewhere quickly is necessary, the option of paying to save time is valuable to people at all income levels." Road space rationing based on license numbers has been implemented in cities such as Athens (1982), México City (1989), São Paulo (1997), Santiago, Chile, Bogotá, Colombia, La Paz (2003), Bolivia, and San José (2005), Costa Rica.

Tradable mobility credits
A more acceptable policy on automobile travel restrictions, proposed by transport economists to avoid inequality and revenue allocation issues, is to implement a rationing of peak period travel but through revenue-neutral credit-based congestion pricing. This concept is similar to the existing system of emissions trading of carbon credits, proposed by the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse emissions. Metropolitan area or city residents, or the taxpayers, will have the option to use the local government-issued mobility rights or congestion credits for themselves, or to trade or sell them to anyone willing to continue traveling by automobile beyond the personal quota. This trading system will allow direct benefits to be accrued by those users shifting to public transportation or by those reducing their peak-hour travel rather than the government.

Funding and financing
Methods of funding and financing transport network maintenance, improvement and expansion are debated extensively and form part of the transport economics field.

Funding issues relate to the ways in which money is raised for the supply of transport capacity. Taxation and user fees are the main methods of fund-raising. Taxation may be general (e.g. income tax), local (e.g. sales tax or land value tax) or variable (e.g. fuel tax), and user fees may be tolls, congestion charges or fares. The method of funding often attracts strong political and public debate.

Financing issues relate to the way in which these funds are used to pay for the supply of transport. Loans, bonds, public–private partnerships and concessions are all methods of financing transport investment.

Regulation and competition
Regulation of the supply of transport capacity relates to both safety regulation and economic regulation. Transport economics considers issues of the economic regulation of the supply of transport, particularly in relation to whether transport services and networks are provided by the public sector, by the private sector, or a mixture of both.

Transport networks and services can take on any combination of regulated/deregulated and public/private provision. For example, bus services in the UK outside London are provided by both the public and private sectors in a deregulated economic environment (where no-one specifies which services are to be provided, so the provision of services is influenced by the market), whereas bus services within London are provided by the private sector in a regulated economic environment (where the public sector specifies the services to be provided and the private sector competes for the right to supply those services – i.e. franchising).

The regulation of public transport is often designed to achieve some social, geographic and temporal equity as market forces might otherwise lead to services being limited to the most popular travel times along the most densely settled corridors of development. National, regional or municipal taxes are often deployed to provide a network that is socially acceptable (e.g. extending timetables through the daytime, weekend, holiday or evening periods and intensifying the mesh of routes beyond that which a lightly regulated market would probably provide).

Franchising may be used to create a supply of transport that balances the free-market supply outcome and the most socially desirable supply outcome.

Project appraisal and evaluation
The most sophisticated methods of project appraisal and evaluation have been developed and applied in the transport sector. The terms appraisal and evaluation are often confused in relation to the assessment of projects. Appraisal refers to ex ante (before the event) assessment and evaluation refers to ex post (after the event) assessment.

Appraisal
The appraisal of changes in the transport network is one of the most important applications of transport economics. In order to make an assessment of whether any given transport project should be carried out, transport economics can be used to compare the costs of the project with its benefits (both social and financial). Such an assessment is known as a cost-benefit analysis, and is usually a fundamental piece of information for decision-makers, as it places a value on the net benefits (or disbenefits) of schemes and generates a ratio of benefits to costs which may be used to prioritise projects when funding is constrained.

A primary difficulty in project appraisal is the valuation of time. Travel time savings are often cited as a key benefit of transport projects, but people in different occupations, carrying out different activities and in different social classes value time differently.

Appraising projects on the basis of their supposed reductions in travel times has come under scrutiny in recent years with the recognition that improvements in capacity generate trips that would not have been made (induced demand), partially eroding the benefits of reduced travel times. Therefore, an alternative method of appraisal is to measure changes in land value and consumer benefits from a transport project rather than the measuring benefits accruing to travellers themselves. However, this method of analysis is much more difficult to carry out.

Another problem is that many transport projects have impacts that cannot be expressed in monetary terms, such as impacts on, for example, local air quality, biodiversity and community severance. Whilst these impacts can be included in a detailed environmental impact assessment, a key issue has been how to present these assessments alongside estimates of those costs and benefits that can be expressed in monetary terms. Recent developments in transport appraisal practice in some European countries have seen the application of multi-criteria decision analysis based decision support tools. These build on existing cost-benefit analysis and environmental impact assessment techniques and help decision makers weigh up the monetary and non-monetary impacts of transport projects. In the UK, one such application, the New Approach to Appraisal has become a cornerstone of UK transport appraisal.

Evaluation
The evaluation of projects enables decision makers to understand whether the benefits and costs that were estimated in the appraisal materialised. Successful project evaluation requires that the necessary data to carry out the evaluation is specified in advance of carrying out the appraisal.

The appraisal and evaluation of projects form stages within a broader policy making cycle that includes:
 * identifying a rationale for a project
 * specifying objectives
 * appraisal
 * monitoring implementation of a project
 * evaluation
 * feedback to inform future projects

Social effects on poverty
In the US those with low income living in cities face a problem called “poverty transportation.” The problem arises because many of the entry-level jobs which are sought out by those with little education are typically located in suburban areas. Those jobs are also not very accessible by public transportation because the transportation was often designed to move people around cities, which becomes a problem when the jobs are no longer located in the cities. Those who cannot afford cars inevitably suffer the worst, because they have no choice but to rely on public transport. The problem is illustrated by an estimation that 70% of entry-level jobs are located in the suburbs, while only 32% of those jobs are within a quarter mile of public transportation. More difficult (or more expensive) access to jobs and other goods & services can act as a ghetto tax.

As a result of the transportation systems in use, but not adequately meeting the needs of those who rely on them, they tend to generate low revenue. And with minimal revenue or funding the transportation systems are forced to decrease service and increase fares, which causes those in poverty to face more inequality. Further those who live in cities with no public transportation become even more excluded from education and work. In places with no public transport a car is the only viable option and that creates unnecessary strain on the roads and environment.

Since automobile use tends to be greater than public transportation use, it also becomes the norm for people to work towards car ownership. Private car ownership has led to a large allocation of resources towards road and bridge maintenance. But underfunding of public transportation prevents everyone who needs transportation from having access to it. And those who can choose between public transportation and private transportation will choose private transportation rather than face the inconveniences of public transportation. The lack of customers willing to use public transport creates a cycle that ultimately never leads to the transportation systems making significant progress. Another reason for low private vehicle ownership among welfare recipients are the established asset limitations. In the U.S. the asset limit is $1000 per vehicle. This forces welfare recipients to purchase old and sub standard vehicles in order not to lose their welfare funding.

There are a number of ways in which public transportation could be improved and for it to become a better and more enticing option for other people who do not necessarily depend on it. Some of these include creating networks of overlapping routes even among different operators to give people more choice in where and how they want to go somewhere. The system should also function as a whole, to prevent drivers from dangerously racing along routes to increase profit. Providing incentives to use public transportation can also be beneficial, as ridership increases the transportation systems can appropriately respond by increasing the frequency along those transportation routes. Even creating bus only lanes or priority lanes at intersections could improve service and speed.

Experiments done in Africa (Uganda and Tanzania) and Sri Lanka on hundreds of households have shown that a bicycle can increase the income of a poor family by as much as 35%. Transport, if analyzed for the cost-benefit analysis for rural poverty alleviation, has given one of the best returns in this regard. For example, road investments in India were a staggering 3–10 times more effective than almost all other investments and subsidies in rural economy in the decade of the 1990s. What a road does at a macro level to increase transport, the bicycle supports at the micro level. Bicycle, in that sense, can be one of the best means to eradicate the poverty in poor nations.

Car taxation
Car taxation is an instrument to influence the purchase decisions of consumers. Taxes can be differentiated to support the market introduction of fuel efficient and low carbon dioxide (CO2) emitting cars.

The European Union Commission has made a proposal for a Council Directive on passenger car taxation which is currently before the Council and Parliament.

The Commission encourages again Member States to adopt this proposal as soon as possible and to adapt their car taxation policies so as to promote the purchase of fuel efficient cars throughout the EU and help manufacturers respect the upcoming fuel efficiency framework, thus contributing their share to reducing the CO2 emissions of cars. Taxes differentiated over the whole range of cars on the market, so as to gradually induce a switch towards less emitting cars, would be an efficient way to reduce compliance costs for manufacturers.

Tax rates on acquisition
In 2011, for a brand new VW Golf Trendline (80 PS, 5G 2T) the taxation rate (all inclusive, i.e. VAT+registration tax+any other taxes) on acquisition was as follows:

title: Transport economics


text:
Alienation

Alienation may refer to:

 * Alienation (property law), the legal transfer of title of ownership to another party
 * Marx's theory of alienation, the separation of things that naturally belong together, or antagonism between those who are properly in harmony
 * Alienation (video game), a 2016 PlayStation 4 video game
 * "Alienation" (speech), an inaugural address by Jimmy Reid as Rector of the University of Glasgow
 * Social alienation, an individual's estrangement from society

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Alienation


text:
Meissner effect

The Meissner effect (or Meißner–Ochsenfeld effect) is the expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor during its transition to the superconducting state when it is cooled below the critical temperature. This expulsion will repel a nearby magnet.

The German physicists Walther Meißner (anglicized Meissner) and Robert Ochsenfeld discovered this phenomenon in 1933 by measuring the magnetic field distribution outside superconducting tin and lead samples. The samples, in the presence of an applied magnetic field, were cooled below their superconducting transition temperature, whereupon the samples cancelled nearly all interior magnetic fields. They detected this effect only indirectly because the magnetic flux is conserved by a superconductor: when the interior field decreases, the exterior field increases. The experiment demonstrated for the first time that superconductors were more than just perfect conductors and provided a uniquely defining property of the superconductor state. The ability for the expulsion effect is determined by the nature of equilibrium formed by the neutralization within the unit cell of a superconductor.

A superconductor with little or no magnetic field within it is said to be in the Meissner state. The Meissner state breaks down when the applied magnetic field is too strong. Superconductors can be divided into two classes according to how this breakdown occurs.

In type-I superconductors, superconductivity is abruptly destroyed when the strength of the applied field rises above a critical value Hc. Depending on the geometry of the sample, one may obtain an intermediate state consisting of a baroque pattern of regions of normal material carrying a magnetic field mixed with regions of superconducting material containing no field.

In type-II superconductors, raising the applied field past a critical value Hc1 leads to a mixed state (also known as the vortex state) in which an increasing amount of magnetic flux penetrates the material, but there remains no resistance to the electric current as long as the current is not too large. Some type-II superconductors exhibit a small but finite resistance in the mixed state due to motion of the flux vortices induced by the Lorentz forces from the current. As the cores of the vortices are normal electrons, their motion will have dissipation. At a second critical field strength Hc2, superconductivity is destroyed. The mixed state is caused by vortices in the electronic superfluid, sometimes called fluxons because the flux carried by these vortices is quantized.

Most pure elemental superconductors, except niobium and carbon nanotubes, are type I, while almost all impure and compound superconductors are type II.

Explanation
The Meissner effect was given a phenomenological explanation by the brothers Fritz and Heinz London, who showed that the electromagnetic free energy in a superconductor is minimized provided

 * $$ \nabla^2\mathbf{H} = \lambda^{-2} \mathbf{H}\, $$

where H is the magnetic field and λ is the London penetration depth.

This equation, known as the London equation, predicts that the magnetic field in a superconductor decays exponentially from whatever value it possesses at the surface. This exclusion of magnetic field is a manifestation of the superdiamagnetism emerged during the phase transition from conductor to superconductor, for example by reducing the temperature below critical temperature.

In a weak applied field (less than the critical field that breaks down the superconducting phase), a superconductor expels nearly all magnetic flux by setting up electric currents near its surface, as the magnetic field H induces magnetization M within the London penetration depth from the surface. These surface currents shield the internal bulk of the superconductor from the external applied field. As the field expulsion, or cancellation, does not change with time, the currents producing this effect (called persistent currents or screening currents) do not decay with time.

Near the surface, within the London penetration depth, the magnetic field is not completely canceled. Each superconducting material has its own characteristic penetration depth.

Any perfect conductor will prevent any change to magnetic flux passing through its surface due to ordinary electromagnetic induction at zero resistance. However, the Meissner effect is distinct from this: when an ordinary conductor is cooled so that it makes the transition to a superconducting state in the presence of a constant applied magnetic field, the magnetic flux is expelled during the transition. This effect cannot be explained by infinite conductivity, but only by the London equation. The placement and subsequent levitation of a magnet above an already superconducting material does not demonstrate the Meissner effect, while an initially stationary magnet later being repelled by a superconductor as it is cooled below its critical temperature does.

The persisting currents that exist in the superconductor to expel the magnetic field is commonly misconceived as a result of Lenz's Law or Faraday's Law. A reason this is not the case is that no change in flux was made to induce the current. Another explanation is that since the superconductor experiences zero resistance, there cannot be an induced emf in the superconductor. The persisting current therefore is not a result of Faraday's Law.

Perfect diamagnetism
Superconductors in the Meissner state exhibit perfect diamagnetism, or superdiamagnetism, meaning that the total magnetic field is very close to zero deep inside them (many penetration depths from the surface). This means that their volume magnetic susceptibility is $$ \chi_{v}$$ = −1. Diamagnetics are defined by the generation of a spontaneous magnetization of a material which directly opposes the direction of an applied field. However, the fundamental origins of diamagnetism in superconductors and normal materials are very different. In normal materials diamagnetism arises as a direct result of the orbital spin of electrons about the nuclei of an atom induced electromagnetically by the application of an applied field. In superconductors the illusion of perfect diamagnetism arises from persistent screening currents which flow to oppose the applied field (the Meissner effect); not solely the orbital spin.

Consequences
The discovery of the Meissner effect led to the phenomenological theory of superconductivity by Fritz and Heinz London in 1935. This theory explained resistanceless transport and the Meissner effect, and allowed the first theoretical predictions for superconductivity to be made. However, this theory only explained experimental observations—it did not allow the microscopic origins of the superconducting properties to be identified. This was done successfully by the BCS theory in 1957, from which the penetration depth and the Meissner effect result. However, some physicists argue that BCS theory does not explain the Meissner effect.

Paradigm for the Higgs mechanism
The Meissner superconductivity effect serves as an important paradigm for the generation mechanism of a mass M (i.e., a reciprocal range, $$\lambda_M: = h/(M c)$$ where h is the Planck constant and c is the speed of light) for a gauge field. In fact, this analogy is an abelian example for the Higgs mechanism, which generates the masses of the electroweak and  gauge particles in high-energy physics. The length $$\lambda_M$$ is identical with the London penetration depth in the theory of superconductivity.

title: Meissner effect


text:
Literary theory

Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy.

History
The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece (Aristotle's Poetics is an often cited early example), ancient India (Bharata Muni's Natya Shastra), and ancient Rome (Longinus's On the Sublime). In medieval times, scholars in the Middle East (Al-Jahiz's al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan, and ibn al-Mu'tazz's Kitab al-Badi) and Europe continued to produce works based on literary studies. The aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism of literature are tied to the history of literature.

Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1980s and 1990s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars". Proponents and critics of the turn to theory take different (and often conflicting) positions about what counts as a theory or what it means to theorize within/about/alongside literature or other cultural creations.

Overview
One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "what is literature?" and "how should or do we read?" – although some contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they create meaning in a "text". However, some theorists acknowledge that these texts do not have a singular, fixed meaning which is deemed "correct".

Since theorists of literature often draw on very heterogeneous traditions of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of language, any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many types of literary theory, which take different approaches to texts. Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include historical and biographical criticism, New Criticism, formalism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism or historical materialism, feminism and French feminism, post-colonialism, new historicism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, narratology and psychoanalytic criticism.

Differences among schools
The different interpretive and epistemological perspectives of different schools of theory often arise from, and so give support to, different moral and political commitments. For instance, the work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile, a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough. Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem's references to "God" by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to.

Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals (that is, the theories) of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language.

In the late 1950s, the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out in his Anatomy of Criticism, was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the ascendance of post-structuralism.

For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction between "literary" and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of "texts", including film, non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events.

Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it is forced to deal with the novel; while other genres are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing.

Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the "correct" interpretation of texts. The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in a close reading. In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other.

Schools
Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors:

 * Aestheticism – associated with Romanticism, a philosophy defining aesthetic value as the primary goal in understanding literature. This includes both literary critics who have tried to understand and/or identify aesthetic values and those like Oscar Wilde who have stressed art for art's sake.
 * Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Harold Bloom
 * African-American literary theory
 * American pragmatism and other American approaches
 * Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty
 * Cognitive literary theory – applies research in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to the study of literature and culture.
 * Frederick Luis Aldama, Mary Thomas Crane, Nancy Easterlin, William Flesch, David Herman, Suzanne Keen, Patrick Colm Hogan, Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, Blakey Vermeule, Lisa Zunshine
 * Cambridge criticism – close examination of the literary text and the relation of literature to social issues
 * I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, Q.D. Leavis, William Empson.
 * Critical race theory
 * Cultural studies – emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life
 * Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, and Stuart Hall (British Cultural Studies); Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; Michel de Certeau; also Paul Gilroy, John Guillory
 * Darwinian literary studies – situates literature in the context of evolution and natural selection
 * Deconstruction – a strategy of "close" reading that elicits the ways that key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable
 * Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell
 * Descriptive poetics
 * Brian McHale
 * Feminist literary criticism
 * Eco-criticism – explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world
 * Gender (see feminist literary criticism) – which emphasizes themes of gender relations
 * Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Elaine Showalter
 * Formalism – a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text
 * German hermeneutics and philology
 * Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Erich Auerbach, René Wellek
 * Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) – which emphasizes themes of class conflict
 * Georg Lukács, Valentin Voloshinov, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin
 * Narratology
 * New Criticism – looks at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issues
 * W. K. Wimsatt, F. R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren
 * New historicism – which examines the work through its historical context and seeks to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature
 * Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, H. Aram Veeser
 * Postcolonialism – focuses on the influences of colonialism in literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous peoples by Western nations
 * Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Declan Kiberd
 * Postmodernism – criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the Other
 * Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Maurice Blanchot
 * Post-structuralism – a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as deconstruction) that criticize or go beyond Structuralism's aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formations
 * Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva
 * Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) – explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text
 * Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Slavoj Žižek, Viktor Tausk
 * Queer theory – examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and sexuality in literature
 * Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michel Foucault
 * Reader-response criticism – focuses upon the active response of the reader to a text
 * Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall
 * Realist
 * James Wood
 * Russian formalism
 * Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp
 * Structuralism and semiotics (see semiotic literary criticism) – examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any structures
 * Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Juri Lotman, Umberto Eco, Jacques Ehrmann, Northrop Frye and morphology of folklore
 * Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Paul Bénichou, Barbara Johnson

title: Literary theory


text:
Talk:Literary theory

Needs criticism section
No criticism section? Poisonous BS that it is, you'd think there'd be some coverage in this article of criticism against literary theory. Fail! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.163.0.41 (talk) 17:53, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

 * I think the statement "the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition" is rather misleading. For one, many of the New Critics were Southerners (Ransom, Tate, Penn, etc.).  Furthermore, I wouldn't be so quick to label all New Criticism as being based in any kind of "religious tradition."  I'm fairly sure both Ransom and Penn made statements of agnosticism or something similar at one point; and althought some of the New Critics were religious, I don't think it's quite right to characterize the whole movement as having any single religious background.  Corbmobile 11:18, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

 * This is just a first stab at a definition. I'm sure I've left out some schools and theorists worthy of mention.  I'd also like to add some brief descriptions of each school, though perhaps those should be in separate entries (some of which no dobt already exist).

 * What about historical literary criticism? Coleridge was a literary critic, though I'm not so sure he'd be considered a literary theorist. -- Marj Tiefert, Thursday, May 2, 2002

 * Good point. I need to add in some historical stuff and trace it all the way back to Longinus's On the Sublime.  That's the earliest example I ever hear referenced.  And, you're right, there are lots of 19th century examples, too.  It rose as a profession in the 20th century, but it was a serious gentleman's passtime in the 19th century.  Should also eventualy add in its roots in biblical criticism/interpretation.  --wheat, May 18, 2002

First paragraph parenthetical note
A source for the claim that Continental philosophy and literary theory are often considered nearly equivalent would be good. I'm not too knowledgeable in the field, but in the philosophy classes I've taken as an undergrad, I've never heard this claim made before. After all, Heidegger is a prototypical Continental philosopher, correct - and he didn't write much on literary theory as far as I know. Edonovan 01:17, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

 * Lit crit =/= Continental Philo, but Lit Crit draws heavily from Continental Philo enough that I've seen many media accounts confusing or conflating the two. Also inexplicably, of late, many lit crit types with strong Continental influences (e.g. Bhabha, Said, Spivak) have taken to calling themselves philosophers confusing matters further.

 * FYI, aside H wrote extensively on Holderlin's poetry, did an entire course on "Ister", his "Poetry, Language, Thought" examines the crucial importance of poetry and art to H and philosophy. His latter lectures in "Introduction to Metaphysics" are devoted to language examinations that would inspire Gadamer and Derrida. At least 1/4 of his corpus touches on poetry and literature and a good portion of his magnum opus - Being and Time is devoted to Hermeneutics. In short, you are wrong on that point, Heidegger may quite easily be considered, even if the main point about the unsourced claim is sensible enough. Guinness4life (talk) 03:49, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

I agree with the above. I have personally never heard of continental philosophy and literary theory being taken as synonymous. Are continental philosophers like Karl Jaspers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger- who wrote very little about literature- to be considered "literary theorists?" --172.134.204.147 03:35, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

 * Five minutes of Googling turns up some published remarks on the point from scholarly journals, appended below. I am sure that anyone willing to look over introductory texts in literary theory (though I don't have time to do so now) will find many equivalent remarks.  The point is not that the terms are synonymous in any strong or deeply meaningful sense, but that in many discussions they are used in roughly interchangeable senses.  As the above commentators point out, there are good reasons not to think these terms completely synonymous (hence the separate articles explaining each topic in more detail). I think pointing this rough common-parlance equivalence out, as a question of usage, is a worthwhile gesture for the article to make -- particularly as it's intended for readers who are not (or not necessarily) deeply familiar with either field.  -- Rbellin|Talk 04:30, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

 * Some citations on "literary theory" meaning, roughly, continental philosophy:

 * Literary theory has become increasingly and self-consciously philosophical. The philosophical content, however, has tended to be biased toward certain forms of Continental philosophy at the expense of analytic philosophy. Many students who first experience philosophy through literary theory are disappointed by what the find in philosophy departments. The philosophical turn in literary theory has led to a sense of crisis about the nature of the subject.

 * The continental mode of philosophical discourse is predominant in Europe and increasingly prevalent in literary studies in the Anglo-American sphere.

 * Could one say that a division in philosophy—akin if not precisely identical to the old one between "Anglo-American" and "Continental"—has been effected by the selective interdisciplinarity practiced in literary theory? A zone of contact exists, to be sure, between literary theory and a set of writers from Lévinas to Badiou. There is, however, seldom any contact between literary theorists and Rawls's critics, or with the work of Charles Taylor or Will Kymlicka.

None of that justifies the claim that the two are synonymous; what it means is that literary theory draws heavily from continental philosophy. No one in a French or German university would make such a claim. Hanshans23

 * Goethean has just deleted this parenthetical note again from the article, calling it "wrong" in an edit comment. While I'm not too invested in maintaining the parenthesis against what appears to be a reasonably recurrent concern, I'd like to be sure that we are deleting it only for the right reason.  As I said above, the point of a note like this in the lead paragraph is not that the terms literary theory and Continental philosophy are synonymous (in any kind of deep or rigorous way which academic insiders would defend), but that pointing out the overlap between the two in common parlance helps an uninformed reader.  Again, it's fine with me if the consensus supports removing the parenthesis.  But I am concerned that this question -- about the pedagogical utility of this remark to Wikipedia's ordinary reader -- be addressed, one way or the other, rather than removing the statement in order to defend disciplinary turf or advance an academic agenda. -- Rbellin|Talk 17:12, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Here is the parenthetical note:
 * (In much casual academic discussion in the English-speaking world, the terms "literary theory" and "Continental philosophy" are roughly interchangeable, though there are clear distinctions between the two.)

I would ilke it to have the following form:
 * Although x and y are often conflated in casual discussion, x differs from y insofar as z.

— goethean ॐ 17:29, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

On Confusion Over Parenthetical Statement
Okay? The parenthetic remark doesn't make any sense to me. "...the terms 'literary theory' and 'Continental philosophy' are mistakenly used interchangeably..." I've never heard of this either and would like some substantial evidence of its existence before the continuity of the claim as is. Even the one promoting the statement writes that "Five minutes of Googling turns up some published remarks on the point from scholarly journals, appended below..." then three remarks are quoted which fail to provide any example of literary criticism and continental philosophy mistakenly used interchangeably.

Here are bits of the professed evidence:

1. "Literary theory has become increasingly and self-consciously philosophical. The philosophical content, however, has tended to be biased toward certain forms of Continental philosophy at the expense of analytic philosophy."

How does this come close to reinforcing the erroneous claim that literary theory and continental philosophy are ever used interchangeably? An erroneous claim is still just as erroneous even within parentheses!

2. "The continental mode of philosophical discourse is predominant in Europe and increasingly prevalent in literary studies in the Anglo-American sphere."

Certainly there's truth to this statement, but saying that this statement means "...the terms 'literary theory' and 'Continental philosophy' are mistakenly used interchangeably..." that is far from truthful.

3. "Could one say that a division in philosophy—akin if not precisely identical to the old one between 'Anglo-American' and 'Continental'—has been effected by the selective interdisciplinarity practiced in literary theory? A zone of contact exists, to be sure, between literary theory and a set of writers from Lévinas to Badiou. There is, however, seldom any contact between literary theorists and Rawls's critics, or with the work of Charles Taylor or Will Kymlicka."

This excerpt, due to the amazing powers of the Google search-engine, merely has the word Continental and literary theory in it. It doesn't have anything to do with furthering the parenthesized claim at all, seriously. Read it. It's discussing the origins of a rift in philosophy being caused by the interdisciplinary nature of literary theory.

None of these citations have provided adequate reason for the statement to continue as is!

There needs to be further explanation for the parenthetical statement. Its presence is a complete mystery to me. If a significant reason can't be provided, I recommend the deletion of this empty statement that reads more like an opinion gone faulty.

66.63.67.133 10:47, 20 December 2006 (UTC)Michael Madore

hermeneutics
This looks like it will be a very useful article. Two questions: first, is hermeneutics one specific literary theory, or are all literary theories hermeneutical? Second, is it possible to define literary theory without putting "literature" in the predicate? Nod only does it sound tautological, it also raises the question of what we mean by "literature." I ask this because most people think of "literature" as fictional or creative writing, often for elite consumption. But many of these theories have been applied to all sorts of linguistic productions -- not only popular novels but myths, scientific and historical texts, as well as verbal utterances. I realize "literature" should be its own article, but I still think this article needs to define literature and explain the relationship between literary theory and literature on the one hand, and between literary theory and other things that at least some would not think of as literature, on the other. SR

 * Hermeneutics is usually counted as a specific theory. I don't know much about hermeneutics, so please jump in there and define it and/or list some relevant authors.  I think the shortest definition we could make of literary criticism and/or literary theory is "the formal study of texts".  Then we can explain that "text" often means "literary (i.e. 'high' art) texts" but that the same principles have been applied to non-fiction, pop fiction, film, historical documents, law, advertising, etc.  In fact, in structuralism, you often find cultural events like fasion, football, riots, etc treated as 'texts'.  So, yes, I'm with you on broadening this out.  We could also note that a big part of post-structuralism is the idea of colapsing the usual distinctions between 'literary' and other sorts of texts, which the basic idea behind formalism is that literary texts are a special category/type of writing.

 * thanks for great input. I'm really looking forward to helping make this entry a solid one -- wheat, May 19, 2002

 * Well, you are welcome -- and thank you for your work. I am afraid I really do not have much to offer, as this is not my field; at best I am a dilettante here.  E.g. hermeneutics: I know that the classic examples are Dilthey and Gadamer, but I haven't read either so I do not feel comfortable saying anything.  But I like your modified definition and am taking the liberty of incorporating it into the article, SR

 * It's looking really good. I like that opening paragraph.  I remember Habermas being important in Hermenutics, so I'll add him (and maybe read up on him a bit).  I'm going to add in some examples of 19th century criticism and talk about the distinction between ethical schools (i.e. this work promotes/does not promote civility) and schools whose sole purpose seem to be ranking the text among other (i.e. "this is the best poem in the English language").  I'll try to hit it this weekend and make some real progress.  Keep diving in there and tightening up the prose, it's helping.  -- wheat

 * I do not think Habermas is a hermeneutician; he is a philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School and critical theory -- which I think is quite different from hermeneutics, SR

 * Agree. I've read H. If you can come up with a hermeneutics work he's done, list it, but I'm at a loss. He's mostly a political philosopher. See: Gadamer (and his ilk), Ricoeur, the perenially popular Derrida. Hermeneutics is usually out of a philosophy or theology department. Lit crit is out of a lit dep't. In practice, they differ a bit because of that (kind of like history of ideas and epistemology). On paper, they often look the same. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.68.20.21 (talk) 03:35, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

 * Seems like I have seen him mentioned in connection with hermeneutics as well as with critical theory. I'll have to dig out a book I'm thinking of that might shed some light.  I've been checking out some of the pages that the lit theory page links to now and there's work to be done there too (today I added a bit to a definition of deconstruction and added an entry on Derrida that someone else really expanded into something good).  I'm actually reading an essay by Horace on the art of poetry.  And some of the info from the preface could be worth including (like Plato's comments in book X of The Republic).  Most all of my work with literary theory has been with post-1960s theorists, so it's fun to fill in some of the history of it--quite a learning experience for me.

 * Do you know what's going on in lit theory these days? When I finished grad school, New Historicism was still all the rage (and, really, my favorite approach).  I'm curious to know what's going on these days (but too lazy to read PMLA).

 * Sorry, I have practically exhausted my knowledge -- I'd leave it to someone active in Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, Modern Languages, or English to take it further SR

 * Habermas and Derrida are (were?) both fairly major influences on Dominick LaCapra. LaCapra wrote some interesting books re: examining intellectual history in a literary-critical way (Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language). --Trith 09:16, May 22, 2004 (UTC)

 * While I am on the subject, something about Hayden White (who I presume is one of the Johns Hopkins academics responsible for the expansion of literary theory from that university in the 1970s) might be useful as well. White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe was a fairly interesting piece on literary-critical consideration of historiography. --Trithemius 09:21, May 22, 2004 (UTC)

New weird?
I'm not familiar with New_Weird as a literary theory. Its page describes it as a literary movement, which in and of itself wouldn't warrant inclusion here. It seems to be more of an aesthetic preference by authors of literature than a theory used for interpretation of literature by critics. thither 04:01, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

New Criticism & Formalism
The article lists these separately, but they are synonymous. New Critics (the title is ironic now, but emerged as a response to Historical criticism) focus on the formal aspects of a text. I believe Formalism is more apt name to this approach, and should include some mention of New Criticism as a historical note. Pscisco 16:09, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Tense
Does anyone notice how in this list all the schools are written about in a present tense, except for both structuralism and semiotics? They are each written about in a past tense, which implies they are a thing of the past. But there are still prominent semioticians, such as Umberto Eco, so I have changed “examined” to “examine” to remove this connotation. I think that this gives a more accurate portrayal of semiotics, at least, and structuralism, at best. --Le vin blanc (talk) 23:58, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Foucault in QT? WTF?
He passed away well before. And wouldn't occur to me as representative anyway. Monique Wittig, hmm? Also, I'm missing Neo Marxism (Marcuse, Althusser; dominant ideology etc) as a distinct school from original/old/pre-Stalin/pre-high-modernism Marxism, and I'd prefer Adorno (Horkheimer, et al) under "Critical Theory" (or "Frankfurt School", at least!?), not Marxsim. So they were Marxists, so what, who wasn't? -- their writing deviates enough (completely?) to merit...

Anyone?

-- Zin (talk) 00:20, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Critical Theory is total wank?
Anyone? 90.205.92.52 (talk) 03:11, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * to paraphrase the hitchhikers guide: mostly wank.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 03:54, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

related stub article
Text (literary theory) is a stub article with very poor information. maybe it needs to be merged?Mercurywoodrose (talk) 03:54, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Question re: Category:Literary critics
I've posted a question on how to organize Category:Literary critics over at Wikipedia Talk:WikiProject Literature. Please chime in. Thanks! Aristophanes 68  (talk)  17:12, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

History of Literary Theory and Academic History of it
Was looking at the Yale Course on Literary Theory that includes philosophers like Derrida, Lacan, etc. And was trying to figure out what the hell literary theory is in relation to philosophy. This article doesn't really do a good job at explaining it besides giving a list of the different schools of thought. If the article gave more central drive describing the history of the movement (instead of just as a 'fad'), instead of just listing groups that were critical of the movement (maybe dividing it up so that groups like Lacan, Derrida, Deconstructionism, Feminist Literary Criticism etc. were given more emphasis) to improve readability and more describing the movement of Literary Theory in the 20th and 21st century. I'll maybe give this article more focus later, but I see potential for the article, but if someone more knowledgeable in the topic could help, it'd be much appreciated. Shaded0 (talk) 07:18, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Literary theory. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20010903182420/http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/gutenberg/etext99/poetc10.txt to http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/gutenberg/etext99/poetc10.txt
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080516000249/http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/defence.html to http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/defence.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 16:28, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

title: Talk:Literary theory


text:
Literary criticism

A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.

Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory is a matter of some controversy. For example, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism, and almost always uses the terms together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary criticism a practical application of literary theory, because criticism always deals directly with particular literary works, while theory may be more general or abstract.

Literary criticism is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in literature departments and publish in academic journals, and more popular critics publish their reviews in broadly circulating periodicals such as The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Dublin Review of Books, The Nation, Bookforum, and The New Yorker.

Classical and medieval criticism
Literary criticism is thought to have existed as far back as the classical period. In the 4th century BC Aristotle wrote the Poetics, a typology and description of literary forms with many specific criticisms of contemporary works of art. Poetics developed for the first time the concepts of mimesis and catharsis, which are still crucial in literary studies. Plato's attacks on poetry as imitative, secondary, and false were formative as well. The Sanskrit Natya Shastra includes literary criticism on ancient Indian literature and Sanskrit drama.

Later classical and medieval criticism often focused on religious texts, and the several long religious traditions of hermeneutics and textual exegesis have had a profound influence on the study of secular texts. This was particularly the case for the literary traditions of the three Abrahamic religions: Jewish literature, Christian literature and Islamic literature.

Literary criticism was also employed in other forms of medieval Arabic literature and Arabic poetry from the 9th century, notably by Al-Jahiz in his al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan, and by Abdullah ibn al-Mu'tazz in his Kitab al-Badi.

Renaissance criticism
The literary criticism of the Renaissance developed classical ideas of unity of form and content into literary neoclassicism, proclaiming literature as central to culture, entrusting the poet and the author with preservation of a long literary tradition. The birth of Renaissance criticism was in 1498, with the recovery of classic texts, most notably, Giorgio Valla's Latin translation of Aristotle's Poetics. The work of Aristotle, especially Poetics, was the most important influence upon literary criticism until the late eighteenth century. Lodovico Castelvetro was one of the most influential Renaissance critics who wrote commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics in 1570.

Baroque criticism
The seventeenth-century witnessed the first full-fledged crisis in modernity of the core critical-aesthetic principles inherited from classical antiquity, such as proportion, harmony, unity, decorum, that had long governed, guaranteed, and stabilized Western thinking about artworks. Although Classicism was very far from spent as a cultural force, it was to be gradually challenged by a rival movement, namely Baroque, that favoured the transgressive and the extreme, without laying claim to the unity, harmony, or decorum that supposedly distinguished both nature and its greatest imitator, namely ancient art. The key concepts of the Baroque aesthetic, such as "conceit' (concetto), "wit" (acutezza, ingegno), and "wonder" (meraviglia), were not fully developed in literary theory until the publication of Emanuele Tesauro's Il Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope) in 1654. This seminal treatise – inspired by Giambattista Marino's epic Adone and the work of the Spanish Jesuit philosopher Baltasar Gracián – developed a theory of metaphor as a universal language of images and as a supreme intellectual act, at once an artifice and an epistemologically privileged mode of access to truth.

Enlightenment criticism

In the Enlightenment period (1700s–1800s), literary criticism became more popular. During this time literacy rates started to rise in the public; no longer was reading exclusive for the wealthy or scholarly. With the rise of the literate public, the swiftness of printing and commercialization of literature, criticism arose too. Reading was no longer viewed solely as educational or as a sacred source of religion; it was a form of entertainment. Literary criticism was influenced by the values and stylistic writing, including clear, bold, precise writing and the more controversial criteria of the author's religious beliefs. These critical reviews were published in many magazines, newspapers, and journals. The commercialization of literature and its mass production had its downside. The emergent literary market, which was expected to educate the public and keep them away from superstition and prejudice, increasingly diverged from the idealistic control of the Enlightenment theoreticians so that the business of Enlightenment became a business with the Enlightenment. This development – particularly of emergence of entertainment literature – was addressed through an intensification of criticism. Many works of Jonathan Swift, for instance, were criticized including his book Gulliver's Travels, which one critic described as "the detestable story of the Yahoos".

19th-century Romantic criticism
The British Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century introduced new aesthetic ideas to literary studies, including the idea that the object of literature need not always be beautiful, noble, or perfect, but that literature itself could elevate a common subject to the level of the sublime. German Romanticism, which followed closely after the late development of German classicism, emphasized an aesthetic of fragmentation that can appear startlingly modern to the reader of English literature, and valued Witz – that is, "wit" or "humor" of a certain sort – more highly than the serious Anglophone Romanticism. The late nineteenth century brought renown to authors known more for their literary criticism than for their own literary work, such as Matthew Arnold.

The New Criticism
However important all of these aesthetic movements were as antecedents, current ideas about literary criticism derive almost entirely from the new direction taken in the early twentieth century. Early in the century the school of criticism known as Russian Formalism, and slightly later the New Criticism in Britain and in the United States, came to dominate the study and discussion of literature in the English-speaking world. Both schools emphasized the close reading of texts, elevating it far above generalizing discussion and speculation about either authorial intention (to say nothing of the author's psychology or biography, which became almost taboo subjects) or reader response. This emphasis on form and precise attention to "the words themselves" has persisted, after the decline of these critical doctrines themselves.

Theory
In 1957 Northrop Frye published the influential Anatomy of Criticism. In his works Frye noted that some critics tend to embrace an ideology, and to judge literary pieces on the basis of their adherence to such ideology. This has been a highly influential viewpoint among modern conservative thinkers. E. Michael Jones, for example, argues in his Degenerate Moderns that Stanley Fish was influenced by his own adulterous affairs to reject classic literature that condemned adultery. Jürgen Habermas, in Erkenntnis und Interesse [1968] (Knowledge and Human Interests), described literary critical theory in literary studies as a form of hermeneutics: knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions – including the interpretation of texts which themselves interpret other texts.

In the British and American literary establishment, the New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s. Around that time Anglo-American university literature departments began to witness a rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory, influenced by structuralism, then post-structuralism, and other kinds of Continental philosophy. It continued until the mid-1980s, when interest in "theory" peaked. Many later critics, though undoubtedly still influenced by theoretical work, have been comfortable simply interpreting literature rather than writing explicitly about methodology and philosophical presumptions.

Current state
Today, approaches based in literary theory and continental philosophy largely coexist in university literature departments, while conventional methods, some informed by the New Critics, also remain active. Disagreements over the goals and methods of literary criticism, which characterized both sides taken by critics during the "rise" of theory, have declined.

Some critics work largely with theoretical texts, while others read traditional literature; interest in the literary canon is still great, but many critics are also interested in nontraditional texts and women's literature, as elaborated on by certain academic journals such as Contemporary Women's Writing, while some critics influenced by cultural studies read popular texts like comic books or pulp/genre fiction. Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and the natural sciences. Darwinian literary studies studies literature in the context of evolutionary influences on human nature. And postcritique has sought to develop new ways of reading and responding to literary texts that go beyond the interpretive methods of critique. Many literary critics also work in film criticism or media studies.

History of the book
Related to other forms of literary criticism, the history of the book is a field of interdisciplinary inquiry drawing on the methods of bibliography, cultural history, history of literature, and media theory. Principally concerned with the production, circulation, and reception of texts and their material forms, book history seeks to connect forms of textuality with their material aspects.

Among the issues within the history of literature with which book history can be seen to intersect are: the development of authorship as a profession, the formation of reading audiences, the constraints of censorship and copyright, and the economics of literary form.

Major twentieth-century schools of critical analysis

 * Historicist approaches
 * New Historicism
 * Formalist approaches
 * Russian Formalism
 * Narratology
 * Structuralism
 * Post-structuralism
 * Deconstructionism
 * Literary Modernism
 * Post-modernism
 * Reader-response criticism
 * Semiotic literary criticism
 * New Criticism
 * Genre studies
 * Hermeneutics
 * Political approaches
 * Marxist literary criticism
 * Cultural studies
 * Postcolonialism
 * Feminist literary criticism
 * Ecocriticism
 * Psychological approaches
 * Archetypal literary criticism
 * Phenomenology
 * Psychoanalytic literary criticism
 * New Humanism
 * Race and sexuality approaches
 * African-American literature
 * Queer theory
 * Critical race theory
 * Affect theory
 * Disability studies

Classical and medieval periods

 * Plato: Ion, Republic, Cratylus
 * Aristotle: Poetics, Rhetoric
 * Horace: Art of Poetry
 * Longinus: On the Sublime
 * Plotinus: On the Intellectual Beauties
 * St. Augustine: On Christian Doctrine
 * Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy
 * Aquinas: The Nature and Domain of Sacred Doctrine
 * Dante: The Banquet, Letter to Cangrande Della Scala
 * Boccaccio: Life of Dante, Genealogy of the Gentile Gods
 * Christine de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies
 * Bharata Muni: Natya Shastra
 * Rajashekhara: Inquiry into Literature
 * Valmiki: The Invention of Poetry (from the Ramayana)
 * Anandavardhana: Light on Suggestion
 * Cao Pi: A Discourse on Literature
 * Lu Ji: Rhymeprose on Literature
 * Liu Xie: The Literary Mind
 * Wang Changling: A Discussion of Literature and Meaning
 * Sikong Tu: The Twenty-Four Classes of Poetry

Renaissance period

 * Lodovico Castelvetro: The Poetics of Aristotle Translated and Explained
 * Philip Sidney: An Apology for Poetry
 * Jacopo Mazzoni: On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante
 * Torquato Tasso: Discourses on the Heroic Poem
 * Francis Bacon: The Advancement of Learning
 * Henry Reynolds: Mythomystes
 * John Mandaville: Composed in the mid-14th century – most probably by a french physician

Enlightenment period

 * Thomas Hobbes: Answer to Davenant's preface to Gondibert
 * Pierre Corneille: Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place
 * John Dryden: An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
 * Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux: The Art of Poetry
 * John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
 * John Dennis: The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry
 * Alexander Pope: An Essay on Criticism
 * Joseph Addison: On the Pleasures of the Imagination (Spectator essays)
 * Giambattista Vico: The New Science
 * Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
 * David Hume: Of the Standard of Taste
 * Samuel Johnson: On Fiction, Rasselas, Preface to Shakespeare
 * Edward Young: Conjectures on Original Composition
 * Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Laocoön
 * Joshua Reynolds: Discourses on Art
 * Richard "Conversation" Sharp Letters & Essays in Prose & Verse
 * James Usher :Clio: or a Discourse on Taste (1767)
 * Denis Diderot: The Paradox of Acting
 * Immanuel Kant: Critique of Judgment
 * Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
 * William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven or Hell, Letter to Thomas Butts, Annotations to Reynolds' Discourses, A Descriptive Catalogue, A Vision of the Last Judgment, On Homer's Poetry
 * Friedrich Schiller: Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
 * Friedrich Schlegel: Critical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments, On Incomprehensibility

19th century

 * William Wordsworth: Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads
 * Anne Louise Germaine de Staël: Literature in its Relation to Social Institutions
 * Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling: On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature
 * Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Genius, On the Principles of Genial Criticism, The Statesman's Manual, Biographia Literaria
 * Wilhelm von Humboldt: Collected Works
 * John Keats: letters to Benjamin Bailey, George & Thomas Keats, John Taylor, and Richard Woodhouse
 * Arthur Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Idea
 * Thomas Love Peacock: The Four Ages of Poetry
 * Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Defence of Poetry
 * Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Conversations with Eckermann, Maxim No. 279
 * Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Philosophy of Fine Art
 * Giacomo Leopardi: Zibaldone (notebooks)
 * Francesco de Sanctis: Critical Essays; History of the Italian Literature
 * Thomas Carlyle: Symbols
 * John Stuart Mill: What is Poetry?
 * Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Poet
 * Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve: What Is a Classic?
 * James Russell Lowell: A Fable for Critics
 * Edgar Allan Poe: The Poetic Principle
 * Matthew Arnold: Preface to the 1853 Edition of Poems, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, The Study of Poetry
 * Hippolyte Taine: History of English Literature and Language
 * Charles Baudelaire: The Salon of 1859
 * Karl Marx: The German Ideology, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
 * Søren Kierkegaard: Two Ages: A Literary Review, The Concept of Irony
 * Friedrich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense
 * Walter Pater: Studies in the History of the Renaissance
 * Émile Zola: The Experimental Novel
 * Anatole France: The Adventures of the Soul
 * Oscar Wilde: The Decay of Lying
 * Stéphane Mallarmé: The Evolution of Literature, The Book: A Spiritual Mystery, Mystery in Literature
 * Leo Tolstoy: What is Art?

20th century

 * Benedetto Croce: Aesthetic
 * Antonio Gramsci : Prison Notebooks
 * Umberto Eco: The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas; The Open Work
 * A. C. Bradley: Poetry for Poetry's Sake
 * Sigmund Freud: Creative Writers and Daydreaming
 * Ferdinand de Saussure: Course in General Linguistics
 * Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Structural Study of Myth
 * T. E. Hulme: Romanticism and Classicism; Bergson's Theory of Art
 * Walter Benjamin: On Language as Such and On the Language of Man
 * Viktor Shklovsky: Art as Technique
 * T. S. Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent; Hamlet and His Problems
 * Irving Babbitt: Romantic Melancholy
 * Carl Jung: On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry
 * Leon Trotsky: The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism
 * Boris Eikhenbaum: The Theory of the "Formal Method"
 * Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own
 * I. A. Richards: Practical Criticism
 * Mikhail Bakhtin: Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel
 * Georges Bataille: The Notion of Expenditure
 * John Crowe Ransom: Poetry: A Note in Ontology; Criticism as Pure Speculation
 * R. P. Blackmur: A Critic's Job of Work
 * Jacques Lacan: The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience; The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud
 * György Lukács: The Ideal of the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois Aesthetics; Art and Objective Truth
 * Paul Valéry: Poetry and Abstract Thought
 * Kenneth Burke: Literature as Equipment for Living
 * Ernst Cassirer: Art
 * W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley: The Intentional Fallacy, The Affective Fallacy
 * Cleanth Brooks: The Heresy of Paraphrase; Irony as a Principle of Structure
 * Jan Mukařovský: Standard Language and Poetic Language
 * Jean-Paul Sartre: Why Write?
 * Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex
 * Ronald Crane: Toward a More Adequate Criticism of Poetic Structure
 * Philip Wheelwright: The Burning Fountain
 * Theodor Adorno: Cultural Criticism and Society; Aesthetic Theory
 * Roman Jakobson: The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles
 * Northrop Frye: Anatomy of Criticism; The Critical Path
 * Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space
 * Ernst Gombrich: Art and Illusion
 * Martin Heidegger: The Nature of Language; Language in the Poem; Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry
 * E. D. Hirsch Jr.: Objective Interpretation
 * Noam Chomsky: Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
 * Jacques Derrida: Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
 * Roland Barthes: The Structuralist Activity; The Death of the Author
 * Michel Foucault: Truth and Power; What Is an Author?; The Discourse on Language
 * Hans Robert Jauss: Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory
 * Georges Poulet: Phenomenology of Reading
 * Raymond Williams: The Country and the City
 * Lionel Trilling: The Liberal Imagination;
 * Julia Kristeva: From One Identity to Another; Women's Time
 * Paul de Man: Semiology and Rhetoric; The Rhetoric of Temporality
 * Harold Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence; The Dialectics of Poetic Tradition; Poetry, Revisionism, Repression
 * Chinua Achebe: Colonialist Criticism
 * Stanley Fish: Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes Without Saying, and Other Special Cases; Is There a Text in This Class?
 * Edward Said: The World, the Text, and the Critic; Secular Criticism
 * Elaine Showalter: Toward a Feminist Poetics
 * Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: Infection in the Sentence; The Madwoman in the Attic
 * Murray Krieger: "A Waking Dream": The Symbolic Alternative to Allegory
 * Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
 * René Girard: The Sacrificial Crisis
 * Hélène Cixous: The Laugh of the Medusa
 * Jonathan Culler: Beyond Interpretation
 * Geoffrey Hartman: Literary Commentary as Literature
 * Wolfgang Iser: The Repertoire
 * Hayden White: The Historical Text as Literary Artifact
 * Hans-Georg Gadamer: Truth and Method
 * Paul Ricoeur: The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling
 * Peter Szondi: On Textual Understanding
 * M. H. Abrams: How to Do Things with Texts
 * J. Hillis Miller: The Critic as Host
 * Clifford Geertz: Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought
 * Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism
 * Tristan Tzara: Unpretentious Proclamation
 * André Breton: The Surrealist Manifesto; The Declaration of 27 January 1925
 * Mina Loy: Feminist Manifesto
 * Yokomitsu Riichi: Sensation and New Sensation
 * Oswald de Andrade: Cannibalist Manifesto
 * André Breton, Leon Trotsky and Diego Rivera: Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art
 * Hu Shih: Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature
 * Octavio Paz: The Bow and the Lire

title: Literary criticism