Criticism is the branch of study concerned with defining, classifying, expounding and evaluating works of literature. Theoretical criticism undertakes to establish, on the basis of general principles, a coherent set of terms, distinctions and categories to be applied to the consideration and interpretation of works of literature, as well as the “criteria” (the standards or norms) by which these works and their writers are to be evaluated.
The earliest great work of theoretical criticism was Aristotle’s Poetics; recent influential books in English are I.A. Richard’s Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and North ship Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Practical criticism or “applied criticism”, concerns itself with the discussion of particular works and writers; in an applied critique, the theoretical principles controlling the analysis and evaluation are left implicit or brought in only as the occasion demands.
Among the major works of applied criticism in England are the literary essays of Dryden, Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Coleridge’s chapters on the poetry of Wordsworth in Biographia Literaria and his lectures on Shakespeare, Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism and T.S. Eliot’s Selected Essays.
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Practical criticism is sometimes distinguished into impressionistic and judicial criticism:
I. Impressionistic criticism:
It attempts to represent in words the felt qualities of a particular work and to express the attitudes and feelingful responses (the “impression”) which the work directly evokes from the critic as an individual. As Hazlitt put it in his essay “On Genius and Common sense”: “You decide from feeling and not from reason; that is, from the impression of a number of things on the mind …though you may not be able to analyse or account for it in i the several particulars”.
And Walter Pater later said that in criticism “the first step toward! seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate I it, to realise it distinctly” (Preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance). At its extreme! this mode of criticism becomes, in Anatole France’s phrase, “the adventures of a sensitive ] soul among masterpieces”.
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II. Judicial criticism:
On the other hand judicial criticism attempts not merely to communicate, but to analyse and explain the effects of a work in terms of its subject, organisation and techniques and to base the critic’s individual judgements on general standards of literary excellence. Rarely are the two modes of criticism sharply distinct in practice, but good examples of primarily impressionistic commentary can be found in Longinus (see the characterisation of the Odyssey in his essay On the Sublime), Hazlitt, Pater (the locus classics of impressionism is his description of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in The Renaissance) and in the critical essays of E.M Forster and Virginia Woolf.
I. Mimetic criticism:
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It views the literary work as an imitation or reflection or representation of the world and human life and the primary criterion applied to a work is that of the “truth” of its representation to the objects it represents; or should represent. This mode of criticism, which first appeared in Plato and (in a qualified way) in Aristotle, is characteristic of modern theories of literary realism.
II. Pragmatic criticism:
It views the work as something which is constructed in order to achieve certain effects on the audience (effects such as aesthetic pleasure, instruction or special feelings) and it tends to judge the value of the work according to its success in achieving that aim.
This approach, which dominated literary discussion from Roman times through the eighteenth century, has been revived in recent rhetorical criticism, which emphasises the artistic strategies by which an author engages and influences the responses of his readers to the matters represented in a literary work.
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III. Expressive criticism:
It regards the work primarily in relation to the author himself. It defines poetry as an expression or overflow or utterance of feelings or as the product of the poet’s imagination operating on his perceptions, thoughts and feelings; it tends to judge the work by its sincerity or genuineness or adequacy to the poet’s individual vision or state of mind; and it often looks in the work for evidences of the particular temperament and experiences of the author who, consciously or unconsciously, has revealed himself in it. Such views were developed mainly by Romantic critics and remain widely current in our own time.
IV. Objective criticism:
It approaches the work as something which stands free from poet, audience and the environing world. It describes the literary product as a self-sufficient object or integer or as a world-in-itself, which is to be analysed and judged by “intrinsic” criteria such as complexity, coherence, equilibrium, integrity and the interrelations of its component elements. This is the characteristic approach of a number of important critics since the 1920s, including the new critics and the Chicago school of criticism.
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(5) Textual criticism:
A basic literary enterprise, which the ordinary reader takes for granted, is textual criticism; its aim is to establish as closely as possible what an author actually wrote, by assaying and correcting the sources of error and confusion in various printings of a work.
(6) Other varieties of criticism:
It is also common to distinguish types of criticism which bring to bear upon literature various special areas of knowledge and theory, in the attempt to explain the influences which determined the particular characteristics of a literary work. Accordingly, we have “historical criticism”, “biographical criticism”, “sociological criticism” (an important subspecies is “Marxist criticism”), “psychological criticism” (a subspecies is “Freudian criticism”) and archetypal or myth criticism.