Questions tagged [literary-criticism]
Questions related to literary criticism, the branch of the humanities that studies and interprets literature. For literary theory, use the [theory] tag.
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Are there collections of pre-20th-century Shakespeare criticism, esp. focusing on individual plays?
Are there any good, comprehensive primary source readers for criticism of Shakespeare and his individual plays, where the criticism is from before the 20th century?
The introductions of most modern ...
4
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0answers
69 views
Why are William Mcgonagall's poems considered so terrible?
While writing up the wiki excerpt for william-mcgonagall a couple of weeks back, I came upon a rather surprising remark about him in Wikipedia:
He won notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited ...
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2answers
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Why does Elaine Showalter compare Jane Eyre's being locked in a room to menarchal ceremonies?
I don't understand the part in italics. Is it saying that Jane's puberty was similar to the menarchal ceremony held by Eskimo and South Sea Island tribes?
Jane's ritual imprisonment here, and the ...
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1answer
57 views
Is there a term for the boundaries of expectation as established by a story's narration?
I'd like to put a name to the group of expectations established by the narration of a story, including explicit framing devices, verb tense choices, and the narrator's omniscience.
Examples:
A story ...
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0answers
40 views
What is the myth-making school of Shakespeare criticism?
In Inga-Stina Ewbank's essay "The Triumph of Time in The Winter's Tale" (Review of English Literature, 5 (1964); reprinted in Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale. A Casebook, edited by Kenneth ...
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2answers
55 views
Did Yvor Winters describe Emerson's reputation in America as that of a sacred cow?
According to Wikipedia, the American poet and literary critic Yvor Winters (1900 – 1968)
attacked Romanticism, particularly in its American manifestations, and assailed Emerson's reputation as that ...
5
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2answers
266 views
What does it mean to “unmoor criticism”?
The introduction by Pol Neveux to the complete short stories of Guy de Maupassant (the edition that's on Project Gutenberg - I couldn't pin down its exact details) says the following about the article ...
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31 views
Frank Kermode's prelude to modernism
Frank Kermode's The Genesis of Secrecy has the following quote:
One motive of... modernism was the desire to break with a tradition of writing supposed to have been based on a mistaken or dishonest ...
3
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1answer
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The Unity of Action in Shakespeare's “The Tempest”
Many critics claim that Shakespeare's play The Tempest follows all three classical unities. For example:
The play observes the three Unities: the action is confined to parts of the same location, the ...
2
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1answer
102 views
Keats' views on beauty
In the poem Endymion: A poetic romance (1818), the first stanza of Book I (beginning, "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever") focuses a great deal on beauty where Keats presents some of his views on ...
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Did 'A Doll's House' spark controversy over its dismissal of social classes?
I know the play caused drama over feminist ideas and all, but what about the social structure, such as in the end when Nora ignores Torvald's statement "You don’t understand the society you live in" ...
3
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1answer
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Albert Thibaudet and the Geneva School?
I'm learning about the literary critic Albert Thibaudet. I read on Wikipedia that he was the co-founder of the Geneva School of literary criticism, but I don't remember my tutor mentioning that about ...
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53 views
Forms of foregrounding: are recurrence / equivalence the same?
I'm struggling to grasp the difference between the literary devices of recurrence and equivalence. I'm preparing for an exam where we are asked to define these terms. In German, they are referred to ...
3
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44 views
History of Pale Fire's Criticism
How did Pale Fire's interpretation and analysis develop through time? Had there been continuous critical attention towards it and what did Nabokov himself say about the work?
It is quite a ...
3
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1answer
42 views
What is meant by “pensée indétérminée” in the Geneva School?
When I was learning about the Geneva School critics, my tutor said that Georges Poulet and other Geneva School critics wanted to remove the biographical author although he still survives as an ...
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47 views
Does 'literary fiction' neccessarily have to be reality-based, or can it have fantastical themes/elements?
There seems to be a great deal of ambiguity or confusion regarding the definition of ‘literary fiction’. Particularly, it is never really made clear to me whether literary fiction can also be ...
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57 views
What was the first book that taught readers how to analyse and interpret literature?
Books about literaty theory have a long tradition; Aristotle's Poetics dates back to the 4th century BC. Books about how to write literature also go back a long way, for example, Horace's Ars Poetica (...
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What does “layering of roles” mean in this sentence?
What does "layering of roles" precisely mean in the following sentence quoted from Pirandello and the Crisis of Modern Consciousness
by Anthony Francis Caputi?
For the generation of Neveux, Jean ...
5
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1answer
147 views
Academic who abandoned literary criticism and started writing novels?
A number of years ago, I read about an American academic who had been publishing about literary criticism and theory but then at some point (in the 1990s or the early 2000s) decided to move away from ...
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What is the distinction between “literary fiction” vs. “popular fiction”?
What are the defining features of literary fictions as compared to popular ones? Is it the way how characters are developed? Or is it some peculiarity in the use of language? Please feel free to ...
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54 views
To what extent was literary criticism being applied to scientific works at the time Darwin's Plots was written?
I'm reading Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. This book is essentially a work of literary criticism of Darwin's theory of ...
