New Criticism

New Criticism is a twentieth-century approach to literary analysis that treats a literary text as autonomous and interprets it through close attention to language, form, and internal tensions.

Close reading: A method of interpretation that examines a text’s specific words, structures, and effects. New Critics make detailed textual attention the basis of interpretation.
I. A. Richards: An English literary critic whose practical criticism and theories of reading influenced twentieth-century literary study. His classroom experiments anticipated New Criticism’s focus on textual evidence.
Literary criticism: The analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of literary works. New Criticism is one historically influential method within this broader practice.
Biographical criticism: A method of literary interpretation that uses an author’s life to explain a work. New Criticism resists treating an author’s biography as the key to textual meaning.
The New Critics: A group of twentieth-century literary critics associated with text-centered close reading in Britain and the United States. Their essays and teaching practices established the approach as a recognizable movement.
Intentional fallacy: The claim that an author’s intended meaning cannot serve as the standard for interpreting a literary work. It excludes authorial intention from the evidence used to interpret a text.
Practical criticism: A method of literary study that analyzes texts without relying on contextual information about their authors or origins. It supplied an early model for reading texts independently of external context.
Formalism (literature): An approach to literature that prioritizes a work’s form and verbal features in interpretation. New Criticism belongs to the wider family of text-centered formalist approaches.
Historical criticism: A method that interprets literature in relation to the historical conditions of its production. Its contextual evidence contrasts with New Criticism’s emphasis on the self-contained text.
Wimsatt and Beardsley: William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, American critics who formulated influential New Critical doctrines. Their essays defined the intentional and affective fallacies that shaped the method’s boundaries.

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