Other meanings of New Criticism
Literary theory
New Criticism was a formalistic literary criticism movement emphasizing close reading of texts, especially their language, structure, imagery, paradox, and internal tensions. It treated the literary work as an object of study relatively independent of the author’s biography, historical background, or a reader’s private response.
New Criticism developed chiefly in British and American universities between the 1920s and 1950s, in reaction to impressionistic reviewing, biographical interpretation, and approaches that treated literature mainly as historical evidence.1 The movement drew on the practical criticism of I. A. Richards, whose classroom experiments examined how readers responded to poems without identifying their authors or contexts. It also developed through the essays of T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and W. K. Wimsatt.
New Critics argued that a poem or other literary work possesses an organized verbal structure. Meaning arises from relationships among diction, syntax, rhythm, form, imagery, and tone rather than from a detachable paraphrase of its subject. The work’s autonomy did not mean that context was irrelevant in every circumstance; it meant that interpretation should begin with demonstrable features of the text itself.
Close reading tests how a text’s parts cooperate and conflict, making interpretation an evidence-based account of verbal detail. New Critical readings therefore attend to repetition, shifts in voice, figurative language, stanza or scene design, meter, and patterns of opposition.2 Brooks’s influential account of paradox held that poetic language often expresses meanings that ordinary logical paraphrase would flatten or distort.
Other major concepts include irony, the tension between a statement and its larger implications; ambiguity, the coexistence of multiple possible meanings; and organic unity, the idea that a successful work integrates apparently competing elements. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s essays named the intentional fallacy—the error of treating an author’s intended meaning as the definitive meaning—and the affective fallacy—the error of judging a work primarily by its emotional effects on readers.3
New Criticism reshaped literary education by making the detailed interpretation of a bounded text a standard academic practice. Anthologies and university courses used poems, plays, and passages as occasions for disciplined analysis, while the method’s vocabulary entered criticism beyond its original movement.1 It was particularly effective for works whose formal patterning is unusually concentrated, including lyric poetry, Shakespearean drama, and metaphysical poetry.
The approach was criticized for separating texts from politics, institutions, gender, race, and historical change. Marxist, feminist, reader-response, structuralist, post-structuralist, and historicist critics challenged the claim that interpretation can be grounded in textual evidence without theoretical or social assumptions. Some also argued that the movement’s preference for unity undervalued fragmentation, popular genres, oral traditions, and works whose meanings depend strongly on performance or material context. Contemporary close reading often retains New Critical attentiveness while combining it with historical and cultural analysis.
New Criticism was not a single doctrine or formal organization, and its principal writers disagreed about how far literary works could be separated from history and intention. The label became especially influential through textbooks and university teaching, sometimes reducing a varied body of arguments to the slogan that the text alone matters. Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism helped give the movement its name, although related formalist practices predated the book.
The movement also had a less obvious connection with debates about scientific objectivity and professional literary study. Its advocates sought repeatable procedures—quotation, comparison, and analysis of verbal structure—in a field they believed was vulnerable to personal impression. Yet close reading was never a mechanical process: judgments about irony, unity, or significance still required interpretation. Its durable legacy is therefore methodological rather than doctrinal: readers continue to ask what the words, forms, and tensions of a work make possible before moving to larger claims about authors, societies, or readers.
New Criticism is distinct from Russian Formalism, though both emphasize literary form and influenced later formalist practices.
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