Emerging Form of Literature

 WHAT IS LITERATURE
 WHAT IS LITERARY THEORY?
 WHAT IS LITERARY CRITICISM?
 LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM HISTORY?

WHAT IS LITERATURE
One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is " What is Literature?", though many
contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it
can refer to any use of language. But the principles and methods of literary theory have been applied to
non-finction, popular fiction, film, historical documents, law, advertising, etc., in the related fields of
cultural studies.

 Broad scholars of theory that have historically been important include the New Criticism,
formalism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, post- structuralism, Marxism, feminism, and
French feminism, new historicism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, and
psychoanalytic criticism.

Literary criticism
 Literary criticism is the comparison, analysis, interpretation, and/or evaluation of works
of literature.
 Literary criticism is essentially an opinion, supported by evidence, relating to theme,
style, setting or historical or political context.
 It usually includes discussion of the work’s content and integrates your ideas with other
insights gained from research.
 Literary criticism may have a positive or a negative bias and may be a study of an
individual piece of literature or an author’s body of work.
 Although criticism may include some of the following elements in order to support an
idea, literary criticism is NOT a plot summary, a biography of the author, or simply
finding fault with the literature.
  Researching, reading, and writing works of literary criticism will help you to make better
sense of the work, form judgments about literature, study ideas from different points of
view, and determine on an individual level whether a literary work is worth reading.

Examples of some types of literary criticism are:

 Biographical
 Comparative
 Ethical
 Expressive
 Feminist
 Historical
 Mimetic
 Pragmatic
 Psychological
 Social
 Textual
 Theoretical

Literary Theory
 Literary theory is the theory ( or the philosophy) of the interpretation of literature and literary
criticism. Its history begin with classical Greek Poetics and rhetoric and includes, since the 18th
century, aesthetics and hermeneutics.
 In the 20th century, "theory" has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches
to reading texts, most of which are informed by various strands of Continental philosophy.
 "Literary theory" is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature.
By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that
reveal what literature can mean.
 Literary theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools, by which we
attempt to understand literature.
 It is literary theory that formulates the relationship between author and work; literary theory
developed the significance of race, class ,and gender for literary study.
 Literary theory offers varying approaches for understanding the role of historical context in
interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and unconscious elements of the text.
 Literary theorists trace the history and evolution of different genres--narrative, dramatic, lyric--
in addition to the more recent emergence of the novel and the short story, while also
investigating the importance of formal elements of literary structure.
  Lastly, literary theory in recent years has sought to explain the degree to which the text is more
the product of a culture than an individual author and in turn how those texts help to create the
culture.
 Modern literary theory gradually emerges in Europe during the 19th century. "Theoria" indicates
a view or perspective of the Greek stage. Using the various post structuralist and postmodern
theories that often draw on disciplines other than the literary-linguistic, anthropological,
psychoanalytic, and philosophical--for their primary insights, literary theory has become an
interdisciplinary body of cultural theory.
 Literary theory is a site of theories. Traditional literary criticism, "New Criticism," and "
Structuralism" are alike in that they held to the view that the study of literature has an objective
body of knowledge under its scrutiny.

History

The practice of literary theory became a prifession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that
run as far as ancient Greece( Aristotle's Poetics is an often cited early example) and ancient Rome, and
the aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th & 19th centuries are
important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism of literature are, of course, also
closely tied to the history of literature.

The modern sense of "literary theory," however, dates only to approximately the 1950s, when the
structuralist linguistics of Ferdenand de Saussure began strongly to influence English language literary
criticism.

Some scholars, both theoretical and anti- theoretical, refer to the 1970s and 1980s debates on the
academic merits of theory as "the theory of wars."

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