Literary criticism refers to the process of defining, classifying, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating pieces of literature with the purpose of understanding and appreciating them more fully.
Along with examining texts, literary criticism can include investigating authors' backgrounds and exploring other contextual information relevant to the work (e.g. where and when it was written, how it was received at the time).
There are many different schools of literary criticism, including but not limited to:
- Aestheticism
- Critical Race Studies
- Cultural Studies
- Deconstruction
- Feminism
- Historical
- Gender Studies
- Formalism
- Marxism
- Postcolonialism
- Psychoanalysis
- Queer Theory
- Reader-Response
- Structuralism
The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory by 
Key Terms in Literary Theory by 
New Literary History of America by 
Oxford Companion to Children's Literature by 
The Routledge Companion to World Literature by 
The Cambridge History of African American Literature by 
The Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature by 
