Formalism and New Criticism
focus on structure, tone, characters, setting, symbols and linguistic features through explication and close-readingfocus solely on text and not on extratextual factors
Feminist and Gender Criticism
Feminist: focus on roles of women in literature or cultureGender: focus on gender roles or relationships between sexes
Queer Theory
sexuality is culturally constructed rather than determined by physical characteristics present at birthfocus varies from studying texts from LGBTQ community, portrayals of LGBTQ people by either straight or LGBTQ members
Marxist Criticism
(modernized) looks at socioeconomic factors that affect people’s lives (i.e. class structure)
Cultural Studies
focus on blurring “high” and “low” art/literature and broaden the canon (in topic, genre, and style)
Postcolonial Criticism
discover attitudes and tastes, recovering lost literary history during the colonial period, celebrating indigenous cultures that involved storytelling, drama and poetryfocus on how occupation disrupted and changed the course of history in a particular place
Historical Criticism
uses background reading about the life and times of an author (newspaper articles to personal letters) to gain insights into the composition and significance of a given work
New Historicism
focus on what history teaches about literature and what literature teaches about history to see/recreate as much of the cultural context that surrounded both the author and the original intended audience
Psychological Theories
focus on internal mental states, desires, and motivations of characters (or of the author or the readers)
Reader-Response Theories
focus on gaps (those things that a text doesn’t tell that we need to fill in and work out for ourselves) and process (that the meaning of the text is not fixed and complete but rather evolving as the text unfolds in the time it takes to read)
Structuralism
focus on structures that help us understand and interpret texts; cultural v. literary
Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
focus on that no text has a fixed or real meaning because no meaning exists outside of the network of other meanings to which it is connectedmeaning within a text is contingent on all sorts of exterior understandings, allowing for several and even contradictory interpretations to exist simultaneously
