Literary Theory and Criticism
See also: :Category:American literary critics- Edgar Allan Poe: Dark Romanticism, Short-Story Theory
- T. S. Eliot: Modernism
- Harold Bloom: Aestheticism
- Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation, On Photography
- John Updike: Literary realism/modernism and aestheticist critic
- Michiko Kakutani: New York Times critic
- M. H. Abrams: The Mirror and the Lamp (study of Romanticism)
- F. O. Mathiessen: originated the concept "American Renaissance"
- Perry Miller: Puritan studies
- Henry Nash Smith: founder of the "Myth and Symbol School" of American criticism
- Leo Marx: The Machine in the Garden (study of technology and culture)
- Leslie Fiedler: Love and Death in the American Novel
- Stanley Fish: Pragmatism
- Henry Louis Gates: African American literary theory
- Gerald Vizenor: Native American literary theory
- William Dean Howells: Literary realism
- Stephen Greenblatt: New Historicism
- Geoffrey Hartman: Yale school of deconstruction
- John Crowe Ransom: New Criticism
- Cleanth Brooks: New Criticism
- Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric studies
- Elaine Showalter: Feminist criticism
- Sandra M. Gilbert: Feminist criticism
- Susan Gubar: Feminist criticism
- J. Hillis Miller: Deconstruction
- Edward Said: Postcolonial criticism
- Jonathan Culler: Critical theory, deconstruction
- Judith Butler: Post-structuralist feminism
- Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Latina literary theory
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Queer theory
- Fredric Jameson: Marxist criticism
Read more about this topic: American Literature
Famous quotes containing the words literary, theory and/or criticism:
“In literary circles, the men of trust and consideration, bookmakers, editors, university deans and professors, bishops, too, were by no means men of the largest literary talent, but usually of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity and working talent. Indifferent hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative point, or by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New England.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)