2016م - 1444هـ
A Short Introduction to Literary Criticism Saeed Farzaneh Fard Department of Persian Language and Literature, Sarab Branch, Islamic Azad University, Sarab,





Abstract The field of literary criticism these days has tensions. For some scholars, the sheer enjoyment of reading books and the pleasures of personal response to books can be ruined by literary criticism. We don’t like people who don’t like what we do. Of course, or who make us feel that the books we love are somehow inferior. And we aren’t fond of those who seek to bully us into believing that what we got out of a favorite novel or poem was somehow “wrong” and that they know what it “really means”. Or we may feel some literary theories are so obscure they leave us scratching our heads in bewilderment. We have some stereotypes about these kinds of literary critics, including the cartoon image of the teacher who so overanalyzes a work that our pleasure is snuffed out. Keywords: Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Approaches to Literature, Traditional Critical Theories and Applied Criticism, Types of Literary Criticism.





1. Introduction

For centuries literary criticism was considered as an art of writing poetry; it was an advice to the poet rather than the reader. Literary criticism has been applied since the seventeenth century to the description, justification, analysis, or judgments of works arts. Criticism in modern times is classified in different ways. M.H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp talks about four different critical theories: When the critic views art in terms of the universe or what is imitated, he is using the mimetic theory. When the emphasis is shifted to the reader, and the critic views art in terms of its effect on the audience, he is using a pragmatic theory that was dominant up to the end of the eighteenth century. But in the nineteenth century the emphasis shifted to the poet, and poetry became „a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling‟ of the poet. In this case a work of art is essentially the internal made external. Therefore, when a critic views art in terms of the artist, he is using the expressive theory. In the 20th century, the emphasis shifted to the work of art, especially under the influence of the New Criticism. When the critic views art basically in its own terms, seeing the work as a self-contained entity, he is using the objective theory.