Brief History of Literary Theory: A Guide to Critical Theory and Practice

1. INTRODUCTION 

1.1. What is Literary Theory? 

Theory tries to make evaluation more meaningful by examining the assumptions and values that underlie the practice of reading. We ask not simply how good or otherwise is the literary work, but what the text fundamentally means, and from what point of view. Did it always have that meaning, even centuries ago when it was written for a different audience? Can we find larger and more far-reaching meanings in the work, perhaps even unknown to its author? 

Brief History of Literary Theory: A Guide to Critical Theory and Practice 

Why such questions? Can something so theoretical be relevant to the rough and tumble of the everyday world? Yes, says literary theory, because everything we write or say, even our everyday conversation or the newspaper article we skim, has some unexamined attitude or argument threaded into it. At their most basic, sentences are ruled by grammar, which is a school-based discipline we must adopt to make proper sense of the text. Sentences also assume codes of behavior: what we say in the witness box, or craft into the terms of a contract, is very different from the yarn we spin for friends. And even words themselves have expectations, tacit assumptions and histories of usage. ‘First loosen crew-retaining devices A and B,’ says the workshop manual. ‘Our very democracy is at stake,’ says the politician. Words are being used precisely or imprecisely for different purposes. 

Words are the currency of the academic world, and it is the academic world that has primarily embraced literary theory, probably for two reasons. First is academia’s need for new fields of study, enlarging its status and earning power. After its shaky start in the early decades of the twentieth century, the study of English literature could have applied Formalist and other approaches to plays, novels and poetry, but the findings were not secure, particularly in areas like prosody, where authorities disagreed on readings and were hampered by lack of sound theory. The New Criticism subsequently came to the fore, but it too ran out of new things to say on the comparatively restricted canon of English literature, being not so ardently pursued after the 1970s. Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Pound and Eliot, the Modernists, the Postmodernists . . . all these were studied, and still are, but the papers were often retouching's of subjects whose importance had been outlined long before. 

Literary theory therefore came as a godsend. It was taxing, requiring undergraduates to write and think deeply on what they had hitherto accepted as self-evident. It liberated students from more parochial fields of Elizabethan theatre, Romantic poetry, etc. and required them to read widely in European thought and philosophy. It overturned accepted standards and could help broaden the English canon. And, finally, it brought an end to the Edwardian idea of English Literature as genial essays in connoisseurship that could be enjoyed by the public at large. Literary theory was a severely academic field, and was conducted in a strictly academic manner. 

Literary theory — the second reason for its success — could also be used to invigorate social studies into communities disadvantaged by race or gender differences. Social economists might study the bald facts of spending power, living conditions or educational attainments, but literary theory was much more subtle. It made us read English literature in a new way, creating insights into works that were comfortably part of the English canon. Literary critics had always been conscious of class differences in Jane Austen’s novels, but now one could explore the buried assumptions in a land and plantation-owning group — how they obtained and held on to that power, to what extent that was maintained in novels and poetry. The stress shifted from literary matters to deeper issues, which contemporary writing also explores.

1.2. A Brief History of Literary Theory 

The above paragraphs notwithstanding, literary theory is not a unified, all-embracing theory but a complex assemblage of ideas reflecting a long history of enquiry. Leaving aside the classical world, and many European thinkers, whose suggestions are still valuable, Victorian literature in the person of Thomas Arnold (1822-88) saw itself threatened by the crass materialism of a money-oriented middle class, and therefore championed poetry, which Arnold felt would come to replace religion. Poetry expressed a salutary attitude towards life, a ‘freedom from fanaticism’, a ‘delicacy of perception’ and a ‘disinterested play of consciousness’. Admirable attitudes, but did this sympathetic and self-effacing contemplation of the world in all its variety, which Arnold saw exemplified above all in ancient Greece, really apply to the great majority of the hard, workaday lives in Victorian England? Arnold had the benefits of a classical education, and such high-minded ideals were scarcely possible without an independent income. Indeed, while we could recognize the ‘arial ease, clearness, and radiancy’ of Hellenic art, we should also not forget how treacherous and blood-soaked everyday life in the Greek states could be. 

Such approaches were purely theoretical, moreover. No one had ever demonstrated that reading good literature made us better people. Nor what exactly made for good literature. That last was the concern of the The New Criticism founded by I.A. Richards, which undertook a technical audit of the work in question, usually a lyric poem, identifying what worked, what didn’t and why. Ostensibly, that was also the aim of T.S. Eliot’s essays in the 1920s, to identify ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’, but Eliot himself practiced little close reading, and tended to champion the schools of modern writing to which he belonged. His own work was dry and impersonal, moreover, somewhat anguished and drawing on the troubled world of late 19th century French poets for its themes and imagery. 

Eliot indeed had his own nostalgia for a vanished excellence in the Metaphysical Poets, after which writers suffered a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ where intellect and emotion had gone their separate ways. Had they? That was never demonstrated, though the term ‘organic unity’ was popular for generations. Nonetheless, poetry was still seen ‘as the storehouse of recorded values’, and the canon of good books dominated English literature in the 1920-70 period, when it fused with the ‘essential reading’ of academic courses. Literary criticism of the novel, too, came into its own with F.R. Leavis, whose evaluations included a strong emphasis on life-giving meaning. Good novelists exhibited a ‘vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity’. A similar approach was applied to the theatre, most notably the plays of Shakespeare. 

Initially, the New Critics were concerned with the relationship between poetic form and poetic meaning, and not with the emotion generated by the poem. Nor with truth, it must be said. Whether the poet was truly in love when he poured out his despairing longings was irrelevant: the focus was on the text, what the plain words said, independent of place, time, author and intention. A key concern came to be ‘literariness’; the way literature was different from other, more utilitarian forms of writing. Literature defamiliarized language, it was claimed, enabling the writer to depict the world in his or her own way. There were two schools of formalism, both originating in revolutionary Russia: one suffering under Stalinism as it stayed in Russia, (38.1) and the other moving to Prague (38.4) and thence to the west. Both studied the devices that poetry (and to some extent novels and fairy tales) employed to distance itself from everyday reportage, devices like rhyme, stanza shaping, metaphor and symbols. Poetry is not treasured because it expresses time-honoured truths or depths of meaning, therefore, but because of the skilled and extensive way it deploys such devices. Poetry, and all art forms to some extent, are artificial, and certainly not a ‘slice of life’. 

Novels were not poetry, of course: the imagery is much pruned back and rhyme absent. Boris Tomashevsky (1890- 1957) therefore introduced a distinction between the straightforward narrative (fabula) and how that narrative is presented (syuzhet) with all its contrived dialogue, purposeful characterisation, and needful plot. Somewhat similar was Alexander Propp’s (1895-1970) analysis of folktales, though here the fabula applied, with different actors and factors added to help the story along. Actors (hero, villain, false princess, etc) were quite limited in number, but there were 31 different functions (happy ending, punishment of villain, etc.) Functions caused things to happen, and so constituted a hidden structure — something that would become important 30 years later. 

Did literary excellence depend entirely on the extent such defamiliarization devices were employed? Clearly not, as the literary work entirely composed of such devices would be unintelligible. Literary works were a mixture of everyday language and devices, and it was how those devices operated in the larger context — everyday language, devices, and readers’ expectations — that was important. A concluding flourish could be expected in a literary essay, for example, but not a legal document. Creative literature in particular evolved, moreover, and what was striking in theme or expression in one generation had become passé in the next. That evolution could be studied through selective use of defamiliarizing devices, but literature, even the most self-centered lyric, was also seen to reflect larger concerns. Literature was not wholly autonomous, sealed off from the outside world. Nor did the various devices operate in isolation, in ignorance of other devices and the aims of the writing as a whole. What had seemed intriguingly simple was now becoming immensely complex.

Some simplifying principles were clearly needed. One was the concept of dominance. Though literature applied primarily to itself, as a self-referencing whole, it was given shape and order by certain elements, everyday words and devices that pointed to the outside world. The Prague group of formalists also recognised ‘foregrounding’, (38.5) by which certain words were given prominence in the text and others pushed into obscurity, a theme that would be later taken up by deconstruction. Roman Jacobson took matters further by claiming poetry projected the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination, a complex way of arguing that poetry has greater freedom of word choice — which is often true but not a defining feature. (37.2) 

Meanwhile, under the French theoreticians, but originating from notes left by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), language had become a self-contained system of signs. (38) How languages had diverged from Latin into French, Spanish, Flemish, etc was well known historically, but the underlying reasons were obscure. Saussure’s approach was to sidestep such questions and simply look at how languages operate today. Words, he claimed, derive their meaning from the part they play in a whole system of signs, not by reference to the outside world, either directly through sense impressions or via mental operations. To repeat: there were the signified (what the words pointed to: the actual sky, tree, cloud, etc.) and the signifier (the words themselves: ‘sky’, ‘tree’, ‘cloud’, etc.) — and nothing else beyond grammar and social habit. New words appear as needed, but only as the system allows them, i.e. by being different from pre-existing words. Immense philosophical problems attend this happy conjecture (which this book goes into) but the approach, sometimes called linguistic determinism, allowed literary theorists to argue that words are the prime reality, or even the only reality.

This seeming innocuous proposition underlay the French structuralism of the 1960s and 1970s, and the reaction in post-structuralism, which is still with us. To the first belongs the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss. (6.3) All objects and rituals in primitive peoples constitute a sign, he claimed, and one which drew its meaning from its relationship to other signs, a vast, largely hidden structure of binary opposites: manwoman, sky-earth, right-wrong, etc. So arose the myths and native beliefs that seemed strange to us: that human beings have a kinship with the non-living world, for example, or that the tribe was specifically related to animals or birds. 

That the structure of language was the carrier of meaning, not how the outside world was constituted, or the intention of authors, also featured in the work of Roland Barthes (1915- 80). Texts wrote themselves, i.e. were beyond the control of their author, and many aspects of contemporary life are better understood through this cultural symbolism, or semiotics as it came to be called. (7) Terms of address, clothes and social habits — all had an underlying structure. Michel Foucault also wrote with great brio and belligerence on power, its hidden workings in the state, in sexual norms, in normality and even academic discourse. (9) Society’s attitude to lepers and plague victims, for example, which was to keep them isolated and under constant supervision, had parallels in the contemporary treatment of political dissidents, and indeed ourselves under surveillance of the modern state. 

More literature-orientated was the work of Tvetvan Todorov (38) on the structure of narrative (The Grammar of the Decameron) and of Claude Bremont where he distinguished three phases all stories, books and films. First was virtuality, which simply set up the possibility of action. Then came actualization where various additions will set the narrative in motion, though often in an oblique manner. And third was realization, where the expected dénouement arrived, or did not arrive. Most courses in novel writing will set out something similar, but Bremont applied the approach much more generally. Narration itself became a topic of interest, from Wayne Booth’s (40.3) The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) to the much more theoretical Gérard Gennette’s Narrative Discourse (1972/80), which looked at multiple points of view, both visible and interior to the text. 

Jacques Derrida, (8) though writing around the same time as the French structuralists, was a post-structuralist writer. He became famous for deconstruction, an analysis of texts that shows us where writer has chosen one word in preference to others of similar meaning, suppressing or hiding these from us — either deliberately, or by thoughtless immersion in the suppositions of his time. Whence comes the author's authority to make this choice. Not from any conception of ‘what he meant’, as this has no existence outside words. Nor from any unvoiced, inner intention, which is again without any final determinant of meaning, being just the product of repeated suppressions of other thoughts. The double bind is complete. There is no underlying structure to our literary creations, nor an end to that creation and interpretation. All we can do is point to their workings. 

But Derrida's attack went even deeper. Knowledge, identity, truth, meaning — all the great concepts of western thought — achieve their status by delaying or repressing other elements in their derivation. Not only do they push themselves forward as self-sufficient, giving themselves a presence that doesn't exist outside philosophic discourse, but they replace other usages. Hence Derrida's verbal acrobatics — puns, quibbles, equivocations, neologisms, subterfuges, conflations, allusions and playful digressions — masterful or tedious according to viewpoint — all focusing attention on what Derrida claimed is everywhere important in language: its opacity to the world beyond itself and an astonishing fecundity in its own creation. 

In that more general setting, the political and social setting of literature also became a study in its own right. Marxist criticism makes social class and economic relations central to literary analysis. It was not man’s consciousness that defined his nature, argued Karl Marx (1818-83), but his social position in the exploitative system of capitalism. Our understandings of law, religion, philosophy and the arts were not only colored by capitalism, but also often served as fig leaves for a system that necessarily sets one class against another. It’s true, of course, that communist systems have not been a success, but they were parodies of Marx’s hopes, often more repressive than the capitalist systems he denounced. And where they have been successful, as in communist China, party control has been leavened by private enterprise. 

The overarching belief of communism is that work as organized today alienates man from his better nature, and that literature has a role in correcting matters. (41) By that light, much of western literature is simply entertainment, a diversion from realities, which makes the earnest moralizing 15 in Solzhenitsyn’s novels, for example, not a stylistic flaw but a continuation of the great 19th century Russian belief in man’s common humanity. Citizens of western societies may well believe themselves free, moreover, or freer than their counterparts in China or Russia, but that freedom can be illusory, an ideology that is constantly being reinforced by the western media. The need to put bread on the table, survive downsizing in the workplace, repay loans for education, car and house, bring up children and provide for old age keeps all but the wealthiest toiling at their work bench. Communist critics of Middlemarch, Jane Eyre and other 19th century novels have likewise found no difficulty in questioning their heroine’s apparent freedoms.

Feminist theory marks out similar ground for gender studies, most notably the way women have been marginalized, not only in the socio-economic areas of home and work, but in literature. (43) Women have a distinctive voice, or more exactly, voices, as feminine characters and outlooks are as varied as men’s. But what of women in such popular fiction as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes? In Catherine Belsey’s reading, they are largely invisible, opaque and mysterious. They do not have a voice of their own, and certainly not that plurality of voices that Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) regarded as natural and spontaneous. Poetry did have a unity of style, but novels, in narrative and dialogue, spoke a strange hybrid artificially composed to give some artistic unity. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) found men’s attitudes in ‘progressive’ writers like D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, celebrated for their frank portrayal of sex, were far from satisfactory, being too often exploitative, repressive and denigrating. Many attitudes in later fiction (and advertising) were socially constructed stereotypes, moreover: the dangerous seductress, the pouting innocent, the self-sacrificing helpmate, and so on. The barriers women writers faced in overcoming those stereotypes, and having 16 their own writings published, became much more became challenging when those women were not Caucasian, but Black or Hispanic. 

Those disadvantages were also apparent in the field of postcolonial studies, where writers in newly independent countries found themselves not only using the language of their colonial oppressors, but the same European publishing houses. (44) How is an authentic voice achieved that is not complicit with past injustices and demeaning outlooks? No doubt Foucault’s criticisms of the insidious power of institutions were overdone — they hardly inhibited his own career — but the world of sex was certainly under strange taboos. The classical world cared very little about how citizens used their private parts, and indeed a good deal of Greek and Roman literature is openly homosexual. There is also a good deal of the bawdy in Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers, but not in Victorian literature. With a worldwide empire came a need to keep up standards, aided by a muscular Christianity and a host of reforming movements. Was this not hypocritical or even dangerous? Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had shown how pervasive was the sex drive, (19) and literary theorists like Jacques Lacan (1901-81) suggested that the unconscious was structured like a language, (21) thereby giving a key role to semiotics and dissolving the usual boundaries between the rational and irrational. To novelists wanting a more fluid representation of life, and to literary theorists escaping compartmentalized thinking, Freud and Lacan were especially attractive, as to postmodernism generally. How these notions contrast with modern views of brain activity is covered later in this book.

Postmodernism, then, was a sprawling concept of varying beliefs and affiliations, championing the local and particular 17 against past generalizations, which it termed metanarratives. (5.9) In Francois Lyotard’s La Condition Moderne (1979) and the work of Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), the contemporary world was seen as threatening but also hyperreal, i.e. real to the parties concerned but also unreal in the sense that the surrounding world was no longer real. To many readers of the time, those depictions seemed farfetched, but their dystopian visions have become more plausible as individual freedoms have been rolled back with the cooperation of big business, science, media and government in the war on terror, on covid, and the like. (26.2).

Art has a habit of anticipating nature, and postmodernist views appear early in literature. Contemporary poetry rarely deals with ‘the human-interest angle’ of traditional work, which it has relegated to amateur poetry, but does adopt a neutral and prose-like attitude in questioning the minutiae of everyday existence. Seriou's fiction also occupies shadow worlds where everyday attitudes are suspended or challenged. The real and the fictional are interwoven, and well-known stories and genres are recast into flat and fragmentary narratives that do not ‘close’, i.e. do not a have a single ending.

1.3. Assessment

Several points should be made. 

1. Literary theory, the approaches and parent philosophies by which we evaluate literature, has practical limits. English departments and writing schools generally provide their students with a theoretical background to their future labors. But once exams are over, most students happily dispense with theory and take to the practical application of what has been taught them, i.e. the craft that will earn them standing in their community and a modest (usually very modest) income. Good writers are intuitive creatures, and they come to know instinctively when something has to be recast, shortened or bolstered with argument. Theory is there to help them should they need it, but its wider reaches and philosophical implications are not generally of interest. 

2. Theory does not deal with absolutes but with ideas, interpretations, speculations, and elusive chains of thought. Those who write ‘now Derrida has shown that . . .’ or ‘with our better understanding of post-colonial issues . . .’ are laying claim to what does not exist in the everyday sense of the word. These are philosophical positions, with insights and modes of argument. It is perfectly possible to believe that the senses consistently deceive us, for example, and to argue that this world is a delusion. And that position, respectable and with a long history behind it, brings certain consequences that philosophy explores. But the issues remain speculative, and expounding Berkeley's theories to the magistrate's bench will not get us off a speeding fine. Much in life is conducted by shared values, tacit assumptions, unsupported codes of behaviors, and these are only dug up and examined when the unexpected happens. 

The progressive arts do wish to be challenging, of course, free to represent the world in their own way. Sometimes their explorations are guided by theory, or by deductions from current theory, but more usually the theory acts in a consulting or supporting role. To explain themselves, obtain employment and get their work sold, their protagonists extract what they can from notions and fashionable opinions that float round the art world. 

The result may be a patchwork of inconsistent ideas imperfectly understood, but critics, gallery owners and writers of concert notes ask for these viewpoints, and artists find it comforting to have them. 

3. Many twentieth-century movements boil down to very dubious notions, as they have over the centuries. Poets issue statements which are vague, wildly inconsistent and hardly followed through. Manifestos urge crusades to claim aesthetic new ground, which exists only through their own misunderstandings. Critics announce new associations of poets, who themselves deny such a movement exists. More vexing still is radical theory. Even if largely a tangled mass of assertions and misunderstandings of technicalities, it is still necessary reading. For all its deficiencies, theory can focus attention on what writers should be trying to do, act as a prophylactic against the false and stultifying, and open up disciplines that support writing and are fascinating in their own right. As simple introductions, I hope these pages will help readers navigate contested waters and select the area's most useful to them. 

4. Is there now a generally correct theory of literature? No. Is there a body of thought that is broadly accepted? Far from it: the scene is a battlefield of opinions and assertions, with little supporting thought or experiment. 

What then? First, we shall find that matters are not much better in other disciplines, though the battle is more discretely conducted. And second, we should note the particular value of literature, which is so often lost sight of in the uproar. Logic (32) and mathematics (33) seem more worthy contenders for truth (31), and science (34) is more practical. But by investigating the alternatives, meeting them on their own ground, we find that logic and science have enormous shortcomings. Both work towards abstraction, but 20 cannot find bedrock for their beliefs. Indeed, there are several types of logic and mathematics, and each is not wholly compatible with others. Science in the end comes down to procedures which long experience has found to work. 

In contrast, the arts have a different conception of truth, and aim at fullness and fidelity to human experience. By a twist of fate, science itself (36) — through complexity theory (36.3), research in brain functioning (23), and in some aspects of linguistics (37) — is now suggesting that literature is not simply a viable alternative, but in some ways closer to how human beings really function. 

In the following chapter I summarize the findings of a popular and thoughtful account of literary theory (Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today.) and show that her various interpretations of The Great Gatsby are not only a cause for celebration at theory’s fecundity but raise some troubling questions over their currency in the outside world. These are philosophical issues and have to be dealt with by philosophy. Chapter Three therefore looks at concepts of truth and relativism, to what extent matters can be true in one world but not another and suggests alternatives. 

This present Chapter One is an introduction to literary theory. Chapter Two shows literary theory in action, and Chapter Three explores the philosophic foundations of literary theory. Thereafter the book is grouped around topics as the Preface indicates. 

References

My prime source is writing this chapter is Hans Bretons’ Literary Theory: The Basics, 3rd Edition. Routledge 2017, supplemented by material found in later chapters. A more general background is also provided by the following:

1. D.J. Taylor's A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980's (1989), and Julian Symons's Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature 1912-39. (1987).

2. Brian Appleyard's The Culture Club: Crisis in the Arts. (1984) and, for a contrary view, Peter Finch's How to Get your Poetry Published (1991).

3. George Greenfield's Scribblers for Bread (1989).

4. A.F.Scott's The Poet's Craft: A Course in the Critical Appreciation of Poetry (1957).

5. Page 296 in David Daiches's Critical Approaches to Literature 1981.

6. Chapter 11 of George Watson's The Literary Critics (1986), Wendell V. Harris's Literary Meaning: Reclaiming the Study of Literature (1996), Bernard Bergonzi's Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture. (1990). Gerald Graff's Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (1979/95), and Denis Donoghue's The Pure Good of Theory (1992).

7. Patricia Waugh's Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Background 1960-1990 (1995).

8. R. Selden's (Ed) The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume 8. From Formalism to Poststructuralism. (1995).

9. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin's Critical Terms for Literary Study (1995).

10. See any guide to professional writing, e.g. Barry Turner's The Writer's Companion: The Essential Guide to Being Published (1996), Andrew Croft's How to Make Money from Freelance Writing (1992), Phyllis Whitney's Guide to Fiction Writing (1982) and Margaret Geraghty's The Novelist's Guide (1995).

11. Pages 40-42 in George Watson's The Discipline of English: A Guide to Critical Theory and Practice (1978).

12. John Carey's Viewpoint from the T.L.S. in his Original Copy: Selected Reviews and Journalism 1969-1986. (1987).

13. Pages 42-48 in Watson 1978. 

14. Chapters 7 and 8 of Michael A. Arbib and Mary B. Hesse's The Construction of Reality (1986).

15. Hans Eysenck and Glen Wilson's The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories (1973).

16. Hans Berten’s The Idea of the Postmodern (1995).

17. Simon Malpas’ The Postmodern (2005)