Key Concepts in Literary Theory

Julian Wolfreys, Ruth Robbins, Kenneth Womack, Julian Wolfreys, Ruth Robbins, Kenneth Womack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781579583729
• eBook ISBN: 9781135978259
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This book provides students with lucid and authoritative definitions of some of the most significant terms and concepts employed in the study of literary theory. It offers 250 terms from many areas of literary theory, including cultural studies, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, Marxist and feminist studies, postcolonialism, and other areas of identity politics. In addition, it provides definitions of principal areas of literary study, and a chronological chart of major critics and philosophers. Key Concepts in Literary Theory is an indispensable reference work for anyone interested in the complexities of the theories currently discussed in literary and cultural studies.

Areas of Literary, Critical and Cultural Study, with Bibliographies

The following, brief definitions of areas of study and disciplinary focus are not intended to be exhaustive. They serve simply as indications of the principal concerns. Students should refer to works in the bibliographies accompanying each area of interest for key studies of particular disciplines. The bibliographies are selective rather than exhaustive, but are chosen to reflect both recognised exemplary introductions and key influential texts of the areas in question. Furthermore, each area is not of course to be considered exclusive of other literary-theoretical concerns. Readers will note, for example, that feminist studies of literature will be found under ‘African-American criticism’ and ‘ecocriticism’, among others. Similarly, there is considerable implicit, if not explicit, overlap between categories such as ‘cultural studies’, ‘marxism’, ‘cultural materialism’, ‘new historicism’ and ‘post-marxism’. Again, as another example, psychoanalytic textual analysis is of interest among feminists, poststructuralists and so on. There is no absolutely justifiable limit to impose upon any aspect of thought or intellectual praxis, other than as a strategic marker of philosophical and polemical identification. At best, the reader should take the categories as provisional rather than rigid or prescriptive, given that the nature of much literary study, inflected by what is called theoretical interests, is marked by hybridity, heterogeneity and protean mutability, as areas of study have developed over time, and as critics have sought to debate and interact with one another, and with the often fraught discursive, ideological and epistemological frameworks from which their work emerges and by which it is articulated.

African-American Criticism

African-American studies finds its modern origins in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, which dramatically altered North American attitudes regarding the function and meaning of literature as well as the place of ethnic literature in English departments. The Black Arts Movement established African-American literature as a populist art form, while also spawning publishing houses, theatre troupes and study groups. Often associated with such scholars as Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Cornel West, Deborah McDowell and Houston A. Baker, Jr, among others, African-American Studies seeks to create socio-political awareness for various aspects of interracial tension and the relevance of African history and culture to blacks in the United States.

Bibliography

Andrews, William. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana, IL, 1986.

Baker, Jr, Houston A. and Patricia Redmond (eds). Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s. Chicago, 1989.

Baker, Jr, Houston A. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. Chicago, 1984.

Baker, Jr, Houston A. Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. Chicago, 1993.

Baker, Jr, Houston A. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago, 1991.

Bambara, Toni Cade (ed.). The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York, 1970.

Blassingame, John (ed.). Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge, LA, 1977.

Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York, 1987.

Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976. Westport, CT, 1980.

Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism. New York, 1985.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York, 2000.

Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. New York, 1981.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. Houston A. Baker. New York, 1982.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Souls of Black Folk. New York, 1961.

Ford, Nick Aaron. Black Studies: Threat or Challenge. Port Washington, 1973.

Frye, Charles A. Impact of Black Studies on the Curricula of Three Universities. Washington, 1976.

Gates, Jr, Henry Louis (ed.). Black Literature and Literary Theory. New York, 1984.

Gates, Jr, Henry Louis (ed.). The Classic Slave Narratives. New York, 1987.

Gates, Jr, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York, 1988.

Gates, Jr, Henry Louis (ed.). Reading Black, Reading Feminist. New York, 1990.

Gayle, Addison (ed.). The Black Aesthetic. New York, 1971.

Holloway, Karla F. C. Moorings and Metaphors. New Brunswick, NJ, 1992.

hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston, 1981.

Hull, Gloria T. et al. (eds). All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave. Old Westbury, 1982.

Jablon, Madelyn. Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African-American Literature. Iowa City, IA, 1997.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Freedom, 1984.

Smith, Barbara. The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom. New Brunswick, NJ, 1998.

Stepto, Robert and Dexter Fisher (eds). Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction. New York, 1978.

Stepto, Robert. From Behind the Veil: A Study in Afro-American Narrative. New York, 1979.

Washington, Mary Helen (ed.). Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories By and About Black Women. New York, 1975.

Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives. New York, 1987.

Archetypal Criticism

Originating in the work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung, archetypal criticism addresses series of archetypes (myths, patterns, images, figures, symbolic cycles or dreams) in various literary forms. Often appropriated by the proponents of the new criticism during the early part of the twentieth century, archetypal criticism attempts to delineate patterns of plot or character and the ways in which they reveal what Jung refers to as ‘racial memory’, or the collective memories of the entire human race. Hence, such ‘primordial images’ impact our shared sense of human experience – our ‘collective unconscious’, according to Jung. Northrop Frye refined Jung’s notion of archetypes in his landmark volume, The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), a text that concretised archetypal criticism’s place as a primary form of textual practice during the 196...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Concepts and Terms
• Areas of Literary, Critical and Cultural Study, with Bibliographies
• Chronology of Critical Thinkers, with Bibliographies