LITERARY CRITICISM

Jessa Mae A. Puli

BSED 3B

Differentiate the early criticism from the modern criticism.

Answer : Early Criticism was formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literacy
criticism. Wherein the texts are considered to be 'closed' and 'autonomous', meaning that everything
you need to understand in work literature is presented within it. In this era, there was no separation of
form and content(texts are unified by their devices , motifs,themes and patterns).

While in Modern Literary Criticism, the schools of criticism has been abandonment of the holistic
approach, so that in this era it has been replaced, instead by theories that concentrate on one or more
specific aspects (such as focusing on the text only).

Here are the changes during modern literary criticism:

First, art was separated from the church and the status of being sacred; secondly, artists became more
and more autonomous; thirdly, the invention of the printing press gave rise to wider readership,
publication and circulation of the written works; fourthly, the middle class that was gaining power began
to assert its opinions against the Church and the feudal system based on humanism; and last but not the
least, this age also witnessed a very heavy defense of literature and poetry from the charges of
immorality made by the clergy.