The major trends in modern criticism are as follows

The major trends in modern criticism are as follows:

(i) The major influences in this field have been those of Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud.

(ii) A central doctrine of the New Critics asserted that content and form are inseparable – that the content of a poem could be located only in the specific dynamics of the form.

(iii) ‘Criticism can or should become an impersonal technique approaching the precision of science’.

(iv)The Psychological School aspires to render criticism more ‘scientific’ by an increased application of psychological knowledge to its problems.

(v) The influence of social criticism which relates literature to a given social situation.

(vi) Another trend is of ontological criticism which seeks a synthesis between psychological criticism and sociological criticism.