Literary Theory
“Literary theory” is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. By
literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what
literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools,
by which we attempt to understand literature. All literary interpretation draws on a basis in theory but
can serve as a justification for very different kinds of critical activity. It is literary theory that formulates
the relationship between author and work; literary theory develops the significance of race, class, and
gender for literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography of the author and an analysis of
their thematic presence within texts. Literary theory offers varying approaches for understanding the
role of historical context in interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and unconscious
elements of the text. Literary theorists trace the history and evolution of the different genres—
narrative, dramatic, lyric—in addition to the more recent emergence of the novel and the short story,
while also investigating the importance of formal elements of literary structure. Lastly, literary theory in
recent years has sought to explain the degree to which the text is more the product of a culture than an
individual author and in turn how those texts help to create the culture.
1. What Is Literary Theory?
“Literary theory,” sometimes designated “critical theory,” or “theory,” and now undergoing a
transformation into “cultural theory” within the discipline of literary studies, can be understood as the
set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting
literary texts. Literary theory refers to any principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts or
from knowledge external to the text that can be applied in multiple interpretive situations. All critical
practice regarding literature depends on an underlying structure of ideas in at least two ways: theory
provides a rationale for what constitutes the subject matter of criticism—”the literary”—and the specific
aims of critical practice—the act of interpretation itself. For example, to speak of the “unity” of Oedipus
the King explicitly invokes Aristotle’s theoretical statements on poetics. To argue, as does Chinua
Achebe, that Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness fails to grant full humanity to the Africans it depicts
is a perspective informed by a postcolonial literary theory that presupposes a history of exploitation and
racism. Critics that explain the climactic drowning of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening as a suicide
generally call upon a supporting architecture of feminist and gender theory. The structure of ideas that
enables criticism of a literary work may or may not be acknowledged by the critic, and the status of
literary theory within the academic discipline of literary studies continues to evolve.
Literary theory and the formal practice of literary interpretation runs a parallel but less well known
course with the history of philosophy and is evident in the historical record at least as far back as
Plato. The Cratylus contains a Plato’s meditation on the relationship of words and the things to which
they refer. Plato’s skepticism about signification, i.e., that words bear no etymological relationship to
their meanings but are arbitrarily “imposed,” becomes a central concern in the twentieth century to
both “Structuralism” and “Poststructuralism.” However, a persistent belief in “reference,” the notion
that words and images refer to an objective reality, has provided epistemological (that is, having to do
with theories of knowledge) support for theories of literary representation throughout most of Western
history. Until the nineteenth century, Art, in Shakespeare’s phrase, held “a mirror up to nature” and
faithfully recorded an objectively real world independent of the observer.
