Formalist criticism is placed at the center because it deals

primarily with the text and not with any of the outside
considerations such as author, the real world, audience, or
other literature. Meaning, formalists argue, is inherent in the
text. Because meaning is determinant, all other
considerations are irrelevant.
 Biographical criticism is a form of
literary criticism which analyzes a writer's
biography to show the relationship between the
author's life and their works of
literature. Biographical criticism is often
associated with historical-biographical criticism, a
critical method that "sees a literary work chiefly, if
not exclusively, as a reflection of its author's life
and times".
This longstanding critical method dates back at least to the
Renaissance period, and was employed extensively by Samuel
Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779–81).
Like any critical methodology, biographical criticism can be used
with discretion and insight or employed as a superficial shortcut to
understanding the literary work on its own terms through such
strategies as Formalism. Hence 19th century biographical criticism
came under disapproval by the so-called New Critics of the 1920s,
who coined the term "biographical fallacy" to describe criticism that
neglected the imaginative genesis of literature.
Historical criticism, also known as the historical-critical
method or higher criticism, is a branch of criticism that investigates
the origins of ancient texts in order to understand "the world behind the
text". While often discussed in terms of Jewish and Christian writings
from ancient times, historical criticism has also been applied to other
religious and secular writings from various parts of the world and
periods of history. The primary goal of historical criticism is to discover
the text's primitive or original meaning in its original historical context
and its literal sense or sensus literalis historicus.
 The secondary goal seeks to establish a reconstruction of
the historical situation of the author and recipients of the
text. That may be accomplished by reconstructing the true
nature of the events that the text describes. An ancient
text may also serve as a document, record or source for
reconstructing the ancient past, which may also serve as
a chief interest to the historical critic.
In regard to Semitic biblical interpretation,
the historical critic would be able to
interpret the literature of Israel as well as
the history of Israel. In 18th century
Biblical criticism, the term "higher criticism"
was commonly used in mainstream
scholarship in contrast with "lower criticism
".
In the 21st century, historical criticism
is the more commonly used term for
higher criticism, and textual criticism
is more common than the loose
expression "lower criticism".
Historical criticism began in the 17th century and gained popular
recognition in the 19th and 20th centuries. The perspective of the early
historical critic was rooted in Protestant Reformation ideology since its
approach to biblical studies was free from the influence of traditional
interpretation. Where historical investigation was unavailable, historical
criticism rested on philosophical and theological interpretation. With each
passing century, historical criticism became refined into various
methodologies used today: source criticism, form criticism,
redaction criticism, tradition criticism, canonical criticism, and related
methodologies.
 Genre criticism, a method within
rhetorical criticism, analyzes texts in terms of their
genre: the set of generic expectations,
conventions, and constraints that guide their
production and interpretation. In rhetoric, the
theory of genre provides a means to classify and
compare artifacts in terms of their formal,
substantive and contextual features.
By grouping artifacts with others which
have similar formal features or rhetorical
exigencies, rhetorical critics can shed light
on how authors use or flout conventions for
their own purposes. Genre criticism has
thus become one of the main
methodologies within rhetorical criticism.
 New Criticism. New Criticism was
a formalist movement in literary theory that
dominated American literary criticism in the
middle decades of the 20th century. It
emphasized close reading, particularly of
poetry, to discover how a work of literature
functioned as a self-contained, self-referential
aesthetic object.
 In literary theory, formalism refers to critical
approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate
the inherent features of a text. ... Two schools of
formalist literary criticism developed, Russian
formalism, and soon after Anglo-American New
Criticism.
 Formalism is a school of literary criticism and
literary theory having mainly to do with structural
purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text
without taking into account any outside influence.
Formalism rejects or sometimes simply "brackets"
(i.e., ignores for the purpose of analysis) notions of
culture or societal influence, authorship, and content,
and instead focuses on modes, genres, discourse,
and forms.
 Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the
methods of "reading" employed by Freud
and later theorists to interpret texts. It
argues that literary texts, like dreams,
express the secret unconscious desires
and anxieties of the author, that a literary
work is a manifestation of the author's own
neuroses.
 Archetypal literary criticism is a type of
critical theory that interprets a text by focusing on
recurring myths and archetypes (from the
Greek archē, "beginning", and typos, "imprint") in
the narrative, symbols, images, and character
types in literary work. As a form of literary
criticism, it dates back to 1934 when Maud Bodkin
published Archetypal Patterns in Poetry.
 Reader-response criticism is a school
of literary theory that focuses on
the reader (or "audience") and their
experience of a literary work, in contrast
to other schools and theories that focus
attention primarily on the author or the
content and form of the work.
Reader-response criticism is concerned
with how the work is viewed by the
audience. In this approach, the reader
creates meaning, not the author or the
work. Once the work is published, the
author is no longer relevant.
 Reception theory is a version of
reader response literary theory that
emphasizes each particular reader's
reception or interpretation in making
meaning from a literary text. Reception
theory is generally referred to as
audience reception in the analysis of
communications models.
In literary studies, reception theory originated
from the work of Hans-Robert Jauss in the
late 1960s, and the most influential work was
produced during the 1970s and early 1980s in
Germany and the US (Fortier 132), with some
notable work done in other Western European
countries. A form of reception theory has also
been applied to the study of historiography.
 Marxist literary criticism is a loose term
describing literary criticism based on
socialist and dialectic theories. Marxist
criticism views literary works as
reflections of the social institutions from
which they originate.
 New Historicism also has something in common
with the historical criticism of Hippolyte Taine, who
argued that a literary work is less the product of its
author's imaginations than the social circumstances
of its creation, the three main aspects of which Taine
called race, milieu, and moment.
 Harold Aram Veeser, introducing an anthology of
essays, The New Historicism (1989),[3] noted some
key assumptions that continually reappear in New
Historicism; they are:
1. that every expressive act is embedded in a network of
material practices;
2. that every act of unmasking, critique and opposition
uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the
practice it exposes;
3. that literary and non-literary "texts" circulate inseparably;
4. that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access
to unchanging truths, nor expresses inalterable human
nature;
5. [...] that a critical method and a language adequate to
describe culture under capitalism participate in the
economy they describe.— H. Aram Veeser, The New
Historicism
 Feminist literary criticism is
literary criticism informed
by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the
politics of feminism. It uses the principles
and ideology of feminism to critique the
language of literature.
 This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe
the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of
male domination by exploring the economic, social,
political, and psychological forces embedded within
literature.
 This way of thinking and criticizing works
can be said to have changed the way
literary texts are viewed and studied, as
well as changing and expanding the
canon of what is commonly taught. It is
used a lot in Greek myths.
 Postcolonial criticism is part of a larger field
called cultural studies, or race and ethnicity
studies. To understand the importance
of postcolonial literature, a reader should
understand the scope of European involvement in
the lives of people around the world.
Deconstruction, form of philosophical and literary
analysis, derived mainly from work begun in the
1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida,
that questions the fundamental conceptual
distinctions, or “oppositions,” in Western philosophy
through a close examination of the language and
logic of philosophical and literary texts.
Deconstructionist criticism also subject
texts to careful, formal analysis; however,
they reach an opposite conclusion: there is no
meaning in language. They believe that a
piece of writing does not have one meaning
and the meaning itself is dependent on the
reader.
 Visual culture is the aspect of culture
expressed in visual images. Many academic
fields study this subject, including
cultural studies, art history, critical theory,
philosophy, media studies, Deaf Studies[1]
and anthropology.
 Neo-pragmatism, sometimes called post-Deweyan
pragmatism, linguistic pragmatism, or analytic
pragmatism, is the philosophical tradition that infers
that the meaning of words is a function of how they
are used, rather than the meaning of what people
intend for them to describe.