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Module 2
Literary Theory
and Criticism
Reading material N° 1
MODULE 2: LITERARY THEORY & LITERARY CRITICISM

Reading Guide

After studying the origin of literary criticism and theory, in Module 2 the contents and activities aim at
understanding the evolution of different currents in literary analysis. In order to attain this aim, a
historical and ideological description may become useful.

The ancient Greek and Roman civilisations were the ones that, because of their social and political
organisation as well as their religious beliefs and philosophical developments, had a significant impact in
the history of humanity. It is undeniable that they had a fundamental role in the origin of literary criticism,
too. In the subsequent historical periods, their heritage was incredibly powerful, despite the changes that
took place in all spheres of life, as the Roman Empire started to lose power and the dominance of
Christianity marked Middle Ages.

It is worth mentioning that there is a perception of the Middle Ages as an era of darkness, ignorance and
superstition, which clearly differs from the Renaissance that followed, which name implies the rebirth and
rediscovery of Classical thinkers from the preceding era. While it is true that the early Middle Ages, from
the fall of Rome in the hands of Germanic tribes in the fifth century until around 1000 AD, there was a
return to various forms of economic and intellectual primitivism. There were some strong literary and
cultural moments in this period that are defined as Early Middle Ages, in which the main movement was
the Carolingian Renaissance (named after the Emperor Charlemagne or Carolus Magnus) in the ninth
century, and later, there was a great deal of intellectual and cultural progress from the eleventh through
the thirteenth centuries, known as the Later Middle Ages).

The Early Middle Ages

The Middle Ages were characterised by the evolving traditions of Christianity; the social and political
patterns of the Germanic tribes who overran the Roman Empire; vestiges of the Roman administrative
and legal system; the legacy of the classical world; and contact with Islamic. The most powerful force in
the development of Mediaeval civilization was Christianity. The beginnings of Christian thought in the
letters of St. Paul, Clement of Rome, and the Gospel of St. John related the tenets of Christianity to Greek
philosophical concepts1.

Early Christianity had been heterogeneous, containing a large number of sects with disparate beliefs and
practices, often embroiled in disputes. Eventually, in order to settle these doctrinal disputes, a number of

1
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Kannada literature". Encyclopedia Britannica, 28 Jul. 2017,
https://www.britannica.com/art/Kannada-literature Accessed 23 April 2022.
world-wide Church councils were held. One of the greatest Christian thinkers of this period was Jerome (c.
347-420), who translated the Bible from its original languages into Latin.

Other steps were also taken to promote unity of belief and practice: these included the promulgation of
standard sermons, the training of bishops, and the growth of the papacy in power and prestige into a
focus of allegiance and obedience. Nevertheless, Christian doctrine was never fully formalized in the early
Middle Ages, and many of the Eastern Churches adhered to unorthodox beliefs. It took several ecumenical
councils2 until 681 for the most critical differences between the churches at Rome and Constantinople to
be healed, and after the collapse of the empire, it was the Church, increasingly sophisticated in its
organization and dominated by the leadership of the papacy in Rome, which promoted moral values,
appropriate social conduct and learning. It preserved classical culture, latinised their speech and enabled
the emergence of the Romance languages. So much so that Latin remained the language of scholarship
and law during the Middle Ages. Moreover, the Germanic tribes, after invading the Empire, used Latin as
the means of communication wherever they settled. For centuries, Latin was the language of education,
science, government, law, and diplomacy. Writers such as Boccaccio and Petrarch were affected by the
heritage of the Latin Middle Ages, and the influence of mediaeval Latin literature persisted through the
great movements of the modern period such as Humanism, the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Another important aspect of Christianity was monasticism, which was founded by St. Basil and St.
Benedict, and entailed a strict regimen of poverty, obedience, humility, labour and devotion. The monks
who were responsible for writing most books, copying early manuscripts and maintaining schools,
libraries and hospitals. The monks would later develop into the regular clergy (following a strict rule or
regula), as opposed to the secular clergy, the various ranks of priests and bishops who operated in the
worldly sphere. The monastic orders united intellectual and manual labour in the service of God, and
agrarian labour was considered a form of divine worship. Thus, Christianity was a bridge between two
periods: the ancient slave mode of production and the feudal mode of production.

Besides Christianity, the force that overwhelmed the Western Roman Empire was the Germanic peoples,
including Scandinavians, Goths, Vandals, Franks and Anglo-Saxons. Many of these peoples had already
settled in various areas of the Empire long before the fall of Rome. Eventually revolting against Roman
rule, the Visigoths led by Alaric sacked Rome in 410 B.C. The city was taken again by the Vandals in 455
A.D. The lifestyle, as well as the legal, economic and political structure of the Germanic peoples was
primitive in many respects. This structure, amalgamating with the administrative legacy of the Roman
Empire, eventually developed into the system of feudalism, which involved contractual obligations
between rulers and subjects, lords and vassals, obligations based on values such as courage, honour,
loyalty, protection and obedience. Such values were repeatedly expressed in poems such as Beowulf,

2
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "council". Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 Jan. 2007,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/council-Christianity Accessed 21 April 2022.
often in uneasy coexistence with Christian values such as humility and trust in divine providence.

In the early Middle Ages, commerce and industry declined, and land became increasingly concentrated in
the hands of a few, with famine and disease often widespread. The economic system was limited largely
to local trade. As a result, ancient Roman culture gave way to a life centred on villages, feudal estates and
monasteries. This hierarchical and static way of life was determined by the Church, seen as part of the
divinely established order.

One of the most significant figures of this period was Carolus Magnus or Charlemagne (742-814) who
established an empire that extended over Western and central Europe and much of Italy, and to some
extent centralized law and government. He was crowned Emperor by Pope Leo III in 800 A.D., an event
which signified the formation of the Holy Roman Empire, a powerful alliance between the Frankish
dynasty and the papacy. The Empire thus achieved both political unity under Charlemagne, and religious
unity under papal leadership. The mediaeval empire of Charlemagne took over from Rome the idea of a
world empire; therefore, it had a universal, not a national, character. After Charlemagne’s death, the
empire was divided. In 962, Otto the Great of Germany was crowned Emperor by Pope John XII. The Holy
Roman Empire lasted until 1806, although it lost much of its power.

The thought and literature of this period was formulated within the religious and feudal context. The
intellectual currents of the early Middle Ages were driven by two broad factors: the heritage of Classical
thought, and the varying relation of developing Christian theology to this heritage.

In the early Middle Ages, the Church tended to subordinate the position of literature and the arts to the
issues of salvation and preparation for the next life. In general, the widespread instability, insecurity and
illiteracy intensified religious feeling and promoted ideals of withdrawal from the world, condemning
earthly life as worthless and as a means of passage to the next life, to eternal salvation and bliss. As the
theological content of Christianity developed, two broad approaches to Classical literature emerged. The
first one intended to distance Christianity from paganism and rejected the pagan origins of the arts in the
cultures of Greece and Rome, while the second tried to continue the Christian appropriation of Classical
rhetoric and philosophy.

The first stream of Christian thought, deriving from the third century theologian Tertullian (c. 160 – c.
225), focused on the authority of faith and revelation over reason. The ascetic dispositions of monasticism
intensified Christian anxiety concerning worldly beauty and art: St. Jerome, St. Basil, St. Bernard and St.

Francis all turned away from the beauty of nature as a distraction from the contemplation of things
divine. Generally, the early Christian philosophers echoed Plato’s objections to art, namely that art or
image-making, is removed from the truth, and that it appeals to the lower, sensuous part of our nature
and the passions. Tertullian condemned the practise of false imitation in drama.

As for Plato’s second objection, Christians saw pagan arts as expressing emotions such as pride, hypocrisy,
ambition, violence and greed which were opposed to the Christian virtues of humility and love. Christian
thinkers such as Boethius echoed Plato’s concern that the arts were seductive, and could distract men
from what was right.

The second stream of Christian thought, represented by the third-century Christian theologians Clement
and Origen, both from Alexandria, displayed a rationalist emphasis and attempted to reconcile ancient
Greek thought with the tenets of Christianity.

Christian thought was obliged to confront sceptical attitudes to the scriptures, based on textual
inconsistencies as well as incompatibility with reason. Just as the neo-Platonists were driven by an urge to
reconcile Homer and Plato, poetry and philosophy, as well as to harmonize the doctrines of Plato and
Aristotle, so Christian thinkers needed to reconcile the Old Testament with the New Testament, and
scripture generally with the teachings of the Greek philosophers. In response to these needs, both
Christian writers and neo-Platonists developed the tradition of allegorical interpretation.

The tradition of Christian allegorical interpretation effectively begins with St. Paul, and continues through
Clement of Alexandria and his student Origen. Clement believed that reason was necessary for the
understanding of scripture, and that the Greek philosophers had anticipated the Christian conception of
God. He asserted that truth was veiled in symbols. Origen, who viewed the Bible as divinely inspired,
formulated a vastly influential system of allegorical interpretation, according to three levels, literal, moral
and theological, corresponding to the composition of man as body, soul and spirit3.

The Later Middle Ages

In the later Middle Ages, beginning around 1050, there was progress on many levels. Most fundamentally,
there was an economic revival as the feudal system achieved a relatively stable formation. However, the
structural contradictions of feudalism contributed to its decline.

An effect of the growth of feudalism was to increase the power of the landed aristocracy or nobles
relative to that of the monarchy. In turn, one factor in the decline of feudalism was the growth and
establishment of strong monarchies in several countries, notably France, England and Germany. Other
factors were the growing internationalization of trade; the expansion of cities and the increased
opportunities for urban employment, which tempted peasants to move to the towns; the Crusades,
beginning in 1096, which encouraged peasants to break their bonds to the soil of absentee landlords; the
Hundred Years’ War (13371453), which consolidated the monarchy in France; the plague known as the
Black Death which spread over Europe, causing a shortage of labour; and, after 1517, the rise of various

3
Rizzi, M. "Philo, Clement, and Origen", n.p. [cited 26 Apr 2022]. Online:
https://www.bibleodyssey.org:443/en/places/related-articles/philo-clement-and-origen
sects of Protestantism. All of these factors contributed to the explosion of economic practice, as well as its
legitimation by religious and political ideologies, beyond the constraining boundaries of feudalism.

Some streams of literary criticism of the early Mediaeval period either continued, or were rejected in the
later Middle Ages. The tradition of grammatical criticism and textual exegesis had been fairly continuous
from the late classical era onward. Allegorical criticism and exegesis of both pagan and Christian texts had
a similar continuity. One of the most prominent streams of thought of the early Middle Ages, Neo-
Platonism, saw a revival in the twelfth century. Beyond these continuities, the later Middle Ages
witnessed the growth of new intellectual movements, mainly various forms of humanism and
scholasticism, which arose from within the structures and divisions of knowledge that had grown in the
later Mediaeval institutions of learning, like the Cathedral schools and the universities.

In order to understand the new modes of thinking about literature, which were inevitably tied to broader
movements of thought, the larger social and economic developments that marked the later Mediaeval era
must be considered.

The Renaissance

The term ‘Renaissance’ is used to describe the rediscovery of classical Roman and Greek culture in the late
1300s and 1400s and the great pan-European flowering in art, architecture, literature, science, music,
philosophy and politics that this inspired. Education was a driving force, encouraged by the increase in the
number of universities and schools, which was a movement that began in Italy. Gradually, the concept of
a ‘humanistic’ curriculum became stronger as it focused on classical ‘humanities’ subjects such as
philosophy, history, drama and poetry. Printed textbooks and primers enabled students to memorise
snippets from quotable authors in Latin and Greek, sharpen their use of argumentative rhetoric and
develop an elegant writing style. In Britain, humanism was spread by a rapid increase in the number of
‘grammar’ schools, whose language was a primary focus. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Jonson, Bacon
and other writers of this period received a humanist education.

However, humanism produced a strange paradox: European society was still Roman Catholic, yet the
writers and thinkers came from classical, pre-Christian times. The clash was made more obvious in 1517,
when Martin Luther, appalled by corruption in the Church, launched a protest movement against Catholic

teachings. Luther argued that the Church had too much power and needed to be reformed, and promoted
a theology that stressed a more direct relationship between believers and God.

Luther supported the idea that the Bible should be available not just in Latin, but democratically available
in local languages. He published a German translation of the Bible in 1534, which helped bring about
translations into English, French and other languages. In turn, the increased literacy rates implied that
more people had access to education and new thinking. But the political consequences for Europe were
violent, as Protestant and Catholic nations and citizens struggled for control.

Renaissance criticism grew directly from the recovery of classic texts and notably from Giorgio Valla’s
translation of Aristotle’s Poetics into Latin in 1498. From this period until the later part of the 18th century
Aristotle was once again the most imposing presence underlying literary theory. Critics analysed ancient
poems and plays to obtain an insight into the permanent laws of art4. The most influential of Renaissance
critics was probably Lodovico Castelvetro, whose commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics in 1570, encouraged
the writing of structured plays by extending and codifying Aristotle’s idea of the dramatic unities.

Classicism, individualism, and national pride joined forces against literary asceticism. Thus, a group of
16th-century French writers known as the Pléiade were simultaneously classicists, poetic innovators, and
advocates of a purified vernacular tongue.

The ideas of the Italian and French Renaissance were transmitted to England by Roger Ascham, George
Gascoigne, Sir Philip Sidney, and others. Gascoigne’s “Certayne notes of Instruction” (1575), the first
English manual of versification, had a considerable effect on poetic practice in the Elizabethan Age.
Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (1595) vigorously argued the poet’s superiority to the philosopher and the
historian on the grounds that his imagination was not chained to lifeless abstractions or to dull actualities.
While honouring the traditional conception of poetry’s role promoting pleasure and instruction, Sidney
stated the Romantic claim that the poetic mind is a law in itself.

The Renaissance could be regarded as a neoclassical period, since ancient works were considered the
models for modern greatness. Neoclassicism, however, usually connotes narrower attitudes that are at
once literary and social: a controlled enthusiasm, acceptance of proved ways, a gentlemanly sense of
propriety and balance. Criticism of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in France, was dominated by
these Horatian norms. French critics such as Pierre Corneille and Nicolas Boileau urged a strict orthodoxy
regarding the dramatic unities and the requirements of each distinct genre.

Neoclassicism had a lesser impact in England because of different reasons. To start with, English
Puritanism had kept alive some of the original Christian hostility to secular art. Also, English authors were
on the whole closer to plebeian taste than were the court-oriented French, and because Shakespeare,
broke all of the rules. Not even the classicist Ben Jonson could bring himself to deny Shakespeare’s
greatness, and the theme of Shakespearean genius surpassing formal imperfections was stated by major
British critics from John Dryden and Alexander Pope to Samuel Johnson. The science of Newton and the
psychology of Locke also worked subtle changes on neoclassical themes.

The decline of Neoclassicism was not surprising since literary theory had developed very little during two

4
Lazarus, M. (2022) Aristotelian Criticism in Sixteenth-Century England in Oxford Handbooks Online. Available
at:
https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.001.0001/oxfordhb9780199935
338-e-148
centuries of artistic, political, and scientific ferment. The 18th century’s important new genre, the novel,
drew most of its readers from a bourgeoisie that did not share aristocratic tastes. Emphasis shifted from
concern for meeting fixed criteria to the subjective state of the reader and then of the author himself. The
spirit of nationalism entered criticism as a concern for the origins and growth of one’s own native
literature and as an esteem for non-Aristotelian factors such as “the spirit of the age.”

Romanticism

Romanticism, a movement that began in Germany and England at the turn of the 19th century, and later
in France, Italy, and the United States, had representatives such as Goethe and August and Friedrich von
Schlegel in Germany, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, Madame de Staël and
Victor Hugo in France, Alessandro Manzoni in Italy, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe in the
United States.

Jena Romanticism was a first phase of Romanticism in German literature, centred in Jena from about 1798
to 1804. The group was led by the writer Ludwig Tieck. Two members of the group, the brothers August
Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel, who laid down the theoretical basis for Romanticism, the Athenäum,
the circle’s organ. It maintained that the first duty of criticism was to understand and appreciate the right
of genius to follow its natural bent.

The greatest imaginative achievement of this circle is to be found in the lyrics and fragmentary novels of
Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg. The works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich von Schelling
exposed the Romantic doctrine in philosophy, whereas the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher
demonstrated the necessity of individualism in religious thought. By 1804 the circle at Jena had dispersed.
A second phase of Romanticism was initiated two years later in Heidelberg.

Romantics regarded the writing of poetry as an activity related to the creative perception of meaning in
the world. Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), with its definition of poetry as the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings and its attack on Neoclassical diction, is regarded as the opening statement
of English Romanticism. In England, however, only Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria (1817) embraced
the whole complex of Romantic doctrines emanating from Germany; the British empiricist tradition was
firmly rooted and could not be totally washed away by the new metaphysics.

Most of the later called Romantics valued individual passion and inspiration, a taste for symbolism and
historical awareness. Romantic criticism coincided with the emergence of aesthetics as a separate branch
of philosophy, and both signalled a weakening in ethical demands upon literature. The lasting
achievement of Romantic theory is its recognition that artistic creations are justified, not by their
promotion of virtue, but by their own coherence and intensity.

The Romantic movement had been encouraged by German philosophy and also by the utopian hopes of
the French Revolution that were conditioned by political reaction, industrial capitalism and the power of
the class that demanded liberty. Advocates of the literary imagination now began to think of themselves
as enemies of the new bourgeoisie. The idea of creative freedom was reduced to a bohemianism “art for
its own sake” against commerce and respectability.

Aestheticism characterized both the Symbolist criticism of Charles Baudelaire in France and the self-
conscious decadence of Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde in England.

Realistic and naturalistic views of literature as an exact record of social truth were developed by Vissarion
Belinsky in Russia, Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola in France, and William Dean Howells in the United
States. Zola wanted novels to document conditions so as to expose their injustice.

Russian Formalism

Russian Formalism was a movement of literary criticism and interpretation that started during the second
decade of the twentieth century and remained active until about 1930. Members of the Formalist school
emphasized the autonomous

nature of literature and consequently the proper study of literature was not a reflection of the life of its
author. 5

The Russian Formalist movement consisted of two groups, outside the academy: the Moscow Linguistic
Circle, which was founded by the linguist Roman Jakobson in 1915, and the Petersburg OPOJAZ
(Obščestvo izučenija POètičeskogo JAZyka, “Society for the Study of Poetic Language”), which came into
existence a year later and was known for scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Iurii Tynianov, Boris
Eikhenbaum, Boris Tomashevskii, and Victor Vinogradov.

Even when the leading figures in the Russian Formalist movement tended to disagree with one another on
what constituted formalism, they were united in their attempt to move beyond the psychologism and
biographism that pervaded nineteenth-century Russian literary scholarship. The theory of the ‘harmony of
form and content contradicted their formal experimentation and it seemed mere ‘aestheticism’.

It was “literariness,” rather than either image or referent, that the Formalists pursued in their studies of
poetry and prose. With slight variations, literariness in Formalism denoted a particular essential function
present in the relationship or system of poetic works called literature.

The Formalists understood poetic language as operating both synchronically and in an autonomous or
“autotelic” fashion. They consistently stressed the internal mechanics of the poetic work over the
semantics of extraliterary systems, that is, politics, ideology, economics, psychology, and so on.

5
Mambrol. N. (2020) Russian Formalism, in Literary Theory and Criticism (OCTOBER 19, 2020). Available at:
https://literariness.org/2020/10/19/russian-formalism/
Certain Formalists maintained an interest in the thematic level of the poetic work, the content of
everyday, common language and experience as opposed to consciously poetic language, essential to any
analysis of a poetic work. There was also a Formalist shift toward science, considered as a response to the
broader social, economic, and political transformations that the influx of industry and new technology
helped to precipitate throughout early twentieth-century Russia. Consequently, the poetic fetishization of
the machine in futurist poetics and avant-garde aesthetics quickly made its way into Formalist thought.

For Shklovsky, “literariness” is a function of the process of defamiliarization, which involves “estranging,”
“slowing down,” or “prolonging” perception and thereby impeding the reader’s habitual, automatic
relation to objects, situations, and poetic form itself. As a result, the difficulty involved in the process is an
aesthetic end in itself, because it provides a heightened sensation of life. The function of the dominant
forms in the service of literary evolution included the replacement of canonical forms and genres by new
forms, which in turn would become canonized and, likewise, replaced by still newer forms.

Toward the end of the Formalist period, the emphasis on the synchronic nature of poetic devices was
turned into the realization that literature and language should be considered within their diachronic
contexts as well. However, newly emerging literary groups such as the Bakhtin Linguistic Circle (M.M.
Bakhtin, Pavel Medvedev, Valentin Voloshinov) and Prague School of Structuralism (Jan Mukarovsky)
found the Formalists’ attempts to incorporate a diachronic view of the literary work insufficient. Critics
(e.g., Medvedev) attacked the Formalists for refusing to address social and ideological concerns in poetic
language.

With the banning of all artistic organizations and the introduction of “socialist realism” as the new, official
socialist literature of the Soviet Union in 1932, the Russian Formalist movement came to an official close.
Nevertheless, the Formalist approach continued to make itself felt in European and then in America. The
immediate heirs to the Formalist legacy were the Prague Linguistic Circle, founded in 1926 by Jakobson
and a group of Czech linguists, and the Bakhtin Linguistic Circle. The contributions of the Prague Linguistic
made their way into the literary discourses of French structuralism.

Semiotic research continues to renew in various ways the Formalist emphasis upon language and the
devices that generate meaning as sign systems. In the United States, the Formalist approach found a
representative in New Criticism, which emphasized that the literary text was a discrete entity whose
meaning and interpretation need not be contaminated by authorial intention, historical conditions, or
ideological demands.
Bibliographical References:

Video clip of the lecture Watch the video clip that shows lecture The Origins of Romanticism, delivered by
Professor Jonathan Bate. Gresham University. UK. 18 Sept. 2018. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2EA6doUf4&list=RDCMUC1t6kKXoBvjdr8m9KJ2Fx7A&start
_radio=1

Cunningham, D. (2016) Genre without genre. Romanticism, the novel and the new. in Radical Philosophy
196 (March / April 2016). pp .14- 27. Hamerski, W. (2016) The “Poetical Poetics” of Friedrich
Schlegel. in Frorumpoetics. Winter 2016. pp. 6-16.

Selden, R., Widdowson, P. & Brooker, P. (2005) A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Fifth
Edition. Pearson Longman. Chapter 2 - Russian formalism and the Bakhtin School - pp. 29 - 44.

Waugh, P. (2006) Literary Theory and Criticism. An Oxford Guide. Oxford University Press. 16 The Russian
debate on narrative Gary Saul Morson. Chapters 16 The Russian debate on narrative Gary Saul
Morson - pp. 212 – 222 & 17 Bakhtin and the dialogic principle Lynne Pearce