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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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 ...
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1answer
117 views
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, ...
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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
38 views
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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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 ...
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36 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 ...
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37 views
What does this line about Foucault's job being to “historicize discourse and textualize history” mean?
I found a line in my book which says something like this:
Michael Foucault's main job is to historicize discourse and textualize history.
The context of this quote is:
After discovering the ...
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29 views
What is meant by “pensée indétérminée” in Geneva School?
When I was learning about 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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39 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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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
117 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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49 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 ...
