Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy.
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work. Historically, scribes who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant. This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example, the censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons.
Ronald Howard Paulson is an American professor of English, a specialist in English 18th-century art and culture, and the world's leading expert on English artist William Hogarth.
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. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
Ivor Armstrong Richards CH, known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, poet, and rhetorician. His work contributed to the foundations of New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained and self-referential æsthetic object.
Wayne Clayson Booth was an American literary critic and rhetorician. He was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English Language & Literature and the College at the University of Chicago. His work followed largely from the Chicago school of literary criticism.
Walter Jackson Ong was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian, and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness. In 1978 he served as elected president of the Modern Language Association.
Richard Palmer Blackmur was an American literary critic and poet.
Ronald Salmon Crane was a literary critic, historian, bibliographer, and professor. He is credited with the founding of the Chicago School of Literary Criticism.
Children's Literature is an academic journal and annual publication of the Modern Language Association and the Children's Literature Association Division on Children's Literature. The journal was founded in 1972 by Francelia Butler and promotes a scholarly approach to the study of children's literature by printing theoretical articles and essays, as well as book reviews. The publication is currently edited by Amanda Cockrell, of Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. The current editor in chief is R. H. W. Dillard.
New Literary History: A Journal of Theory & Interpretation is a quarterly academic journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press. It focuses on the history and theory of literature, and key questions of interpretation. The journal has received six awards from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
Donald D. Ault was an American academic who was a professor at the University of Florida and is primarily known for his work on British Romantic poet William Blake, British physicist Sir Isaac Newton and American comics artist Carl Barks. He is also known as a foundational figure in the development of American comics studies, and was the General Editor of the academic journal devoted to comics called ImageTexT.
The Hopkins Review is a quarterly literary journal that publishes fiction, poetry, and memoir; essays on literature, drama, film, the visual arts, music, and dance; interviews, folios of visual art, and translations; as well as reviews of books, performances, and exhibits. The original Hopkins Review was a literary quarterly published by the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars from 1947 to 1953. It was brought back in 2008 in a joint venture between the Writing Seminars and the Johns Hopkins University Press. Since 2022, the current editor-in-chief is Dora Malech. The journal won the 2022 Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial and Design Achievement from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
Steven G. Kellman is an American critic and academic, best known for his books Redemption:The Life of Henry Roth (2005) and The Translingual Imagination (2000).
Richard Alan Macksey was Professor of Humanities and co-founder and longtime Director of the Humanities Center at The Johns Hopkins University, where he taught critical theory, comparative literature, and film studies. Professor Macksey was educated at Johns Hopkins, earning his B.A. in 1953 and his Ph.D. in 1957. He taught at Johns Hopkins since 1958. He was the longtime Comparative Literature editor of MLN, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. He was a recipient of the Hopkins Distinguished Alumnus Award. Dr. Macksey also presided over one of the largest private libraries in Maryland, with over 70,000 books and manuscripts. An image of the room overspilling with books has been a popular internet meme in the 2010s and 2020s.
Rita Felski is an academic and critic, who holds the John Stewart Bryan Professorship of English at the University of Virginia and is a former editor of New Literary History. She is also Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (2016–2021).
Mohammad A. Quayum is an academic, writer, editor, critic and translator.
George Thomas Tanselle is an American textual critic, bibliographer, and book collector, especially known for his work on Herman Melville. He was Vice President of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation from 1978 to 2006.
