An Outline History of Literary Criticism: Theory and Practice

Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the nature of literature and of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes in addition to or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense considerations of intellectual history moral philosophy social prophecy and other interdisciplinary themes which are of relevance to the way humans interpret meaning. In the humanities the latter style of scholarship is often called simply theory. As a consequence the word theory has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts. Most of these approaches are informed by various strands of continental philosophy.