Skip to Main Content

Literature

Literary Criticism: The Basics

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. 

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

Along with examining textsliterary criticism can include investigating authors, learning about their background, interests, and other contextual information relevant to their work.

Featured Books

Suggested Databases

Communications & Mass Media Collection: Advertising and public relations, literature and writing, and linguistics.

Ebook Central (formerly Ebrary): Contains books on a range of academic, college-level subjects.

JSTORJournal articles in a scholarly database including anthropology, education, history, literature, philosophy, and sociology.