New CriticismEdit
New Criticism
New Criticism stands as a pivotal mid‑twentieth‑century approach to literary study that treats the text as an autonomous, self-sustaining artifact. Emerging primarily in the United States and Britain in the 1930s–1950s, it shifted criticism away from author biography, historical background, or social politics as primary keys to meaning, toward careful, evidence‑based reading of the work itself. Proponents argued that genuine literary value resides in how a poem or story is crafted—the form, structure, imagery, and rhetorical devices—rather than in external circumstances. This insistence on the text’s independence helped establish a durable standard for evaluating literature and shaped how generations of students were taught to read.
Core tenets
Close reading as the core method: scholars attend to the formal features of the text—diction, imagery, meter, syntax, and figurative language—and how these elements work together to produce meaning. This emphasis on careful, line‑by‑line analysis aims to reveal unity and coherence within the work itself. See Close reading.
The text as a self-contained object: meaning is discovered within the text’s structure and verbal intricacies, not imported from the author’s intentions or the author’s life. This stance treats the work as an artifact that yields its own interpretive possibilities when read closely. See Text and Self-contained text.
Rejection of authorial intent and biographical context as controlling factors: while biographical facts can illuminate a work, New Critics argued they do not determine the work’s meaning. The famous claim about meaning arising from the text itself is closely tied to the critique of the intentional fallacy. See The Intentional Fallacy.
Rejection of the affective fallacy: readers should resist judging a work by the emotional response it provokes in a particular reader. Instead, the evaluation should be grounded in textual evidence and how the form generates meaning. See Affective fallacy.
Emphasis on form, unity, and paradox: New Critics often highlight how complex meanings emerge from tightly knit form, and how ambiguity can coexist with unity within a single artifact. See Form (literature) and Unity (literary theory).
Canon formation and moral seriousness: the approach naturally privileges literature that embodies craftsmanship, moral discernment, and serious aesthetic concerns. This has sometimes translated into a stable canon of works deemed exemplary of enduring literary achievement.
Origins, influences, and development
New Criticism drew on earlier British and American work in close reading and practical criticism. British critic I.A. Richards helped popularize the discipline of reading the poem for its own terms, independent of biography or history. His approach fed into a distinctly American line established by the so‑called Yale School and the circle around the Kenyon Review and the university presses of the era. Figures such as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren played central roles in shaping a movement that valued text‑centered analysis and formal rigor.
A number of single‑text and programmatic works became touchstones. For example, the collection of essays and criticism by the early group at Vanderbilt University helped crystallize a shared method and vocabulary. The practice of close reading was further developed by prominent critics such as Cleanth Brooks and William K. Wimsatt; their collaboration helped popularize the approach in undergraduate curricula and in shaping a professional standard for literary study. See The Well Wrought Urn and The Intentional Fallacy.
The Well Wrought Urn by Cleanth Brooks popularized how form and content reinforce each other, illustrating the method’s emphasis on unity and meaning within a text. See The Well Wrought Urn.
The concept of the intentional fallacy, articulated by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (often cited together with Beardsley) argued that the author’s stated intentions should not govern interpretation. See The Intentional Fallacy and Monroe Beardsley.
New Criticism stood in contrast to movements that foregrounded authorship, context, or ideology. It subsequently interacted with, and often stood in opposition to, newer critical approaches that would emerge in the 1960s and 1970s.
Critiques and debates
New Criticism did not go unchallenged. Critics from other schools argued that the text‑centered method neglects social, historical, and political dimensions of literature, including race, gender, and class. Deconstruction and post‑structuralist theory contended that meaning is not stable or fixed, and that readers’ local interpretations are inseparable from language politics and power relations. See Deconstruction and Post-structuralism.
From a more conservative or traditional vantage point within literary culture, the strongest argument against New Criticism was that it could be overly restrictive, privileging a narrow canon and diminishing awareness of how literature reflects, critiques, or engages with real‑world conditions. Proponents of close reading, however, argued that a disciplined focus on textual evidence safeguards readers from fashionable trendiness and ensures that analysis remains anchored in the work itself, not in passing ideological fashions. This tension—between the autonomy of the text and the social life of literature—remains a central feature of ongoing debates about literary interpretation. See Canon (literature) and Literary theory.
Still, New Criticism is credited with teaching generations of readers to value textual craft and to pursue rigorous, evidence‑based interpretation. It laid groundwork for methods that would later be integrated with other approaches, even as critics expanded the field to consider historical context and social critique. The movement’s emphasis on disciplined reading has informed a broad swath of curriculum and scholarship, from undergraduate literature courses to scholarly editions and critical essays that treat the poem as a precise object of study. See Close reading, Literary criticism.
Legacy in education and scholarship
Even as other critical schools gained prominence, the practice of close reading left a lasting imprint on how literature is taught and analyzed. The insistence that texts possess internal coherence, and that readers must demonstrate interpretive claims with textual evidence, continues to underpin classroom instruction and scholarly work. In some cases, this has complemented broader inquiries into how literature intersects with history and culture, rather than replacing them.
The durability of a text‑centered method is evident in many contemporary curricula that emphasize careful analysis of form and language before turning to external contexts. See Curriculum and Pedagogy.
New Critics’ influence persists in editions and classroom materials that foreground explicit, text‑driven analysis of poems and short fiction. See Annotated edition and Literary criticism.
The tension between form and context continues to inform debates about the purpose of literature and the role of criticism in public life. See Literary theory.