Literary Criticism
Everyone's a critic. But not all literary criticism involves judging the quality of a text; it can also focus on interpreting the meaning of a work or evaluating an author's place in literary history.
Literary Criticism Encyclopedia Articles
Featured Articles
Edward Said
Edward Said Palestinian American academic, political activist, and literary critic who examined literature in light of social and cultural politics and was an outspoken proponent of the political rights...
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom was an American literary critic known for his innovative interpretations of literary history and of the creation of literature. Bloom’s first language was Yiddish, and he also learned Hebrew...
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil), which was perhaps the most important and...
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. (Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)...
T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot exercised...
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes was a French essayist and social and literary critic whose writings on semiotics, the formal study of symbols and signs pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, helped establish structuralism...
Helen Archibald Clarke and Charlotte Endymion Porter
Helen Archibald Clarke and Charlotte Endymion Porter American writers, editors, and literary critics whose joint and individual publications, focused largely on William Shakespeare and the poet Robert...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria...
Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye was a Canadian educator and literary critic who wrote much on Canadian literature and culture and became best known as one of the most important literary theorists of the 20th century. Frye...
literary criticism
Literary criticism, the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as a term, to any argumentation about literature, whether or not specific works are analyzed. Plato’s cautions against...
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson English critic, biographer, essayist, poet, and lexicographer, regarded as one of the greatest figures of 18th-century life and letters. Johnson once characterized literary biographies as...
textual criticism
Textual criticism, the technique of restoring texts as nearly as possible to their original form. Texts in this connection are defined as writings other than formal documents, inscribed or printed on paper,...
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf English writer whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major influence on the genre. While she is best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925)...
Paul de Man
Paul de Man Belgian-born literary critic and theorist, along with Jacques Derrida one of the two major proponents of deconstruction, a controversial form of philosophical and literary analysis that was...