--- title: Literary Criticism description: Literary criticism is the evaluation, analysis, and interpretation of literature. Learners will understand how to apply different analytical frameworks to texts, evaluating their artistic merit, cultural impact, and thematic depth. category: literature-writing subcategory: literature-analysis difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/literary-criticism --- # Literary Criticism Literary criticism is the evaluation, analysis, and interpretation of literature. Learners will understand how to apply different analytical frameworks to texts, evaluating their artistic merit, cultural impact, and thematic depth. ## Available Resources 9 Books • 1 Courses • 1 Websites ## Websites ### 1. The Paris Review Long-running literary quarterly whose online archive holds the Writers at Work interviews with major twentieth- and twenty-first-century novelists and poets, alongside fiction and essays. Useful for understanding how modern authors think about craft, influence and revision. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.theparisreview.org **Tags:** modern-literature, author-interviews, fiction, poetry, literary-magazine ## Courses ### 1. Introduction to Theory of Literature Explore literary theory with Yale's Paul Fry! This introductory course covers key concepts and critical approaches to literature. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300 **Tags:** literary-theory, literary-criticism, structuralism, open-courseware ## Podcasts ### 1. Lit Century **Author:** Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols Host Catherine Nichols and guests choose one book for each year of the twentieth century (Nella Larsen's Passing, 1936, Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, 1966; Mohandas Gandhi's Indian Home Rule, 1909) and talk about it in its historical and literary context. Tune in to find out what the 20th century was all about. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.lithub.com **Tags:** 20th-century-literature, book-discussion, literary-history, author-interviews ### 2. Poetry Off the Shelf **Author:** Poetry Foundation Producer Helena de Groot talks to poets about language, dreams, love and loss, identity, connection, anger, discomfort, the creative process, the state of the world and the world of the soul. Hard conversations are welcomed—laughter is, too. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en-us | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ **Tags:** poetry, poet-interviews, creative-process, contemporary-poetry ## Books ### 1. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature **Author:** Erich Auerbach Twenty essays reading single passages from Homer to Woolf to trace how Western writing represents reality, each chapter a sustained demonstration of stylistic analysis. Shows what literary criticism looks like when practised at full strength rather than described. Rather than naming methods it performs criticism across three millennia of texts, which is the only way to learn judgement. Demanding: assumes broad literary background and multiple traditions. **Difficulty:** Advanced | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691160228?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** literary-criticism, close-reading, realism, western-literature, stylistics ### 2. How to Read Literature **Author:** Terry Eagleton Close-reading companion working through openings, tone, rhythm, syntax, ambiguity, character and narrative in passages from Shakespeare to Beckett. Builds the sentence-level analytical habits that theory presupposes but seldom teaches directly. It teaches the actual mechanics of analysing a passage. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300205309?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** close-reading, literary-analysis, narrative, poetry, literary-criticism ### 3. Literary Theory: An Introduction (Anniversary Edition) **Author:** Terry Eagleton Survey running from phenomenology and structuralism through psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, arguing that no reading is politically neutral. Readers finish able to place each school historically and to see the assumptions buried inside any interpretive method. The single most-assigned survey in the field, and it does something the Yale lectures do not: it makes an argument about why theory exists and what interests it serves, which is the analytical skill the topic is about. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/140517921X?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** literary-theory, structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalytic-criticism, marxist-criticism ### 4. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (2nd Edition) **Author:** Jonathan Culler Short Oxford introduction organized around problems rather than warring schools, covering what literature is, meaning, identity, narrative, ethics and aesthetics. Gives a newcomer the vocabulary and core interpretive moves before tackling primary theorists. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199691347?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** literary-theory, interpretation, narrative, literary-criticism ### 5. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment **Author:** I. A. Richards Richards gave Cambridge students thirteen unattributed poems and published their responses alongside analysis of how readings go wrong: stock responses, sentimentality, doctrinal bias, mishandled rhythm. Serves as a diagnostic account of the interpretive habits that distort evidence-based reading. Source Truth for the entire topic of close reading, and unusually practical for a 1929 text because it is built on documented student misreadings rather than assertion — a reader can test their own responses against the recorded protocols. I **Difficulty:** Advanced | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1138530638?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** close-reading, practical-criticism, literary-criticism, poetry-analysis, new-criticism ### 6. Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century **Author:** Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Princeton guide dividing close reading into five steps — scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, global theorizing — with worked master classes from twenty-one scholars, worksheets and exercises showing how the technique feeds Marxist, queer, Black studies and affect interpretations. The only current book that treats close reading itself as an explicit, teachable procedure and traces it from practical criticism and New Criticism into contemporary methods, including Auerbach and Vendler as case studies. This is the topic's method text; everything else demonstrates the practice on particular genres. **Difficulty:** Advanced | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691265704?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** close-reading, literary-theory, literary-criticism, interpretation, literary-method ### 7. How Fiction Works **Author:** James Wood James Wood analyzes short passages from Flaubert through Roth to explain narration, free indirect style, detail, character, dialogue and realism. Readers finish able to name the technical choices producing prose effects they previously only sensed, and to quote evidence for them. This is the standard modern text for close reading prose, and it teaches transferable mental models (free indirect style, the status of detail, the mechanics of point of view) rather than a checklist. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312428472?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** narrative-technique, free-indirect-style, fiction, close-reading, literary-criticism ### 8. Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies **Author:** Robert Dale Parker An Oxford University Press anthology pairing Parker's explanatory introductions with primary essays across formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial criticism. Readers learn to recognize each school's assumptions and apply them when interpreting literary and cultural texts. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199797773?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, humanities-social-sciences, literrature-analysis ### 9. Literary Criticism: A Short History **Author:** William K. Wimsatt Jr., Cleanth Brooks A history of Western critical thought from Plato and Aristotle through neoclassicism, Romanticism, and the New Criticism, written by two of that movement's founders. Readers gain a grounded sense of how debates about poetry, meaning, and form developed over centuries. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226901750?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, humanities-social-sciences, literrature-analysis --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. 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