The Western canon is the body of high culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that is highly valued in the West: works that have achieved the status of classics. However, not all these works originate in the Western world, and such works are also valued throughout the world. It is "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature". The word 'canon' is derived from Ancient Greek: κανών, meaning a measuring rod, or standard. The Bible, a product of ancient Jewish culture, from the Levant, in Western Asia, has been a major force in shaping Western culture, and "has inspired some of the great monuments of human thought, literature, and art".
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 prophecy, 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 sociology and continental philosophy.
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Caroline Schelling, née Michaelis, widowed Böhmer, divorced Schlegel, was a noted German intellectual. She was one of the so-called Universitätsmamsellen, a group of five academically active women during the 18th and 19th centuries, daughters of academics at Göttingen University, alongside Meta Forkel-Liebeskind, Therese Huber, Philippine Engelhard, and Dorothea Schlözer.
George Edward Bateman Saintsbury, FBA, was an English writer, literary historian, critic, teacher and wine connoisseur. He is regarded as a highly influential critic of early 20th century.
Terence Francis Eagleton is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.
Frank Raymond "F.R." Leavis was an English literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for much of his career at Downing College, Cambridge, and later at the University of York.
Biblical criticism is the use of critical analysis to understand and explain the Bible. During the eighteenth century, when it began as historical-biblical criticism, it was based on two distinguishing characteristics: (1) the scientific concern to avoid dogma and bias by applying a neutral, non-sectarian, reason-based judgment to the study of the Bible, and (2) the belief that the reconstruction of the historical events behind the texts, as well as the history of how the texts themselves developed, would lead to a correct understanding of the Bible. This sets it apart from earlier, pre-critical methods; from the anti-critical methods of those who oppose criticism-based study; from later post-critical orientation, and from the many different types of criticism which biblical criticism transformed into in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Joseph Hillis Miller Jr. was an American literary critic and scholar who advanced theories of literary deconstruction. He was part of the Yale School along with scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, who advocated deconstruction as an analytical means by which the relationship between literary text and the associated meaning could be analyzed. Through his career, he was associated with the Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and University of California, Irvine, and wrote over 50 books studying a wide range of American and British literature using principles of deconstruction.
Queenie Dorothy Leavis was an English literary critic and essayist.
Robert Choate Darnton is an American cultural historian and academic librarian who specializes in 18th-century France.
The academic discipline of women's writing as a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men." It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her sex, i.e. her position as a woman within the literary world. Women's writing, as a discrete area of literary studies and practice, is recognized explicitly by the numbers of dedicated journals, organizations, awards, and conferences which focus mainly or exclusively on texts produced by women. Women's writing as an area of study has been developing since the 1970s. The majority of English and American literature programs offer courses on specific aspects of literature by women, and women's writing is generally considered an area of specialization in its own right.
Feminist literature is fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry, which supports the feminist goals of defining, establishing, and defending equal civil, political, economic, and social rights for women. It often identifies women's roles as unequal to those of men – particularly as regarding status, privilege, and power – and generally portrays the consequences to women, men, families, communities, and societies as undesirable.
Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review was a literature periodical founded in 1932 by L. C. Knights and F. R. Leavis, who remained its principal editor until the final issue in 1953. Other editors included D. W. Harding and Harold Andrew Mason.
Mimi Reisel Gladstein is a professor of English and Theatre Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her specialties include authors such as Ayn Rand and John Steinbeck, as well as women's studies, theatre arts and 18th-century British literature. In 2011 she was named to the El Paso Historical Hall of Honor.
Austin Harvey Gommeknown asAndor Gomme was a British scholar of English literature and architectural history. He was a frequent reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, an author of books on both literary criticism and architectural history, and Chair of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, whose journal, Architectural History, he edited for many years.
New historicism, a form of literary theory which aims to understand intellectual history through literature and literature through its cultural context, follows the 1950s field of history of ideas and refers to itself as a form of cultural poetics. It first developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s. Greenblatt coined the term new historicism when he "collected a bunch of essays and then, out of a kind of desperation to get the introduction done, he wrote that the essays represented something called a 'new historicism'".
The Great Writers series was a collection of literary biographies published in London from 1887, by Walter Scott & Co.. The founding editor was Eric Sutherland Robertson, followed by Frank T. Marzials.
David Bleich is an American literary theorist and academic. He is noted for developing the Bleich "heuristic", a reader-response approach to teaching literature. He is also a proponent of reader-response criticism to literature, advocating subjective interpretations of literary texts. He has published research on language and its use in social contexts as well as postsecondary pedagogy.
Kathryn Kirkpatrick is a poet, scholar, and English professor at Appalachian State University. Her works of poetry focus on the natural world and the ways humans interact with nature, and the ethical treatment of animals. As an academic, she also specializes in Irish literature and culture, which is a common theme in her published works. She has received several awards for her poetry collections.