Described below are nine common critical approaches to the literature. Quotations are from X.J.

Kennedy and Dana Gioia’s Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, Sixth Edition
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pages 1790-1818.

 Formalist Criticism: This approach regards literature as “a unique form of human knowledge

that needs to be examined on its own terms.” All the elements necessary for understanding
the work are contained within the work itself. Of particular interest to the formalist critic are the
elements of form—style, structure, tone, imagery, etc.—that are found within the text. A
primary goal for formalist critics is to determine how such elements work together with the
text’s content to shape its effects upon readers.
 Biographical Criticism: This approach “begins with the simple but central insight that
literature is written by actual people and that understanding an author’s life can help readers
more thoroughly comprehend the work.” Hence, it often affords a practical method by which
readers can better understand a text. However, a biographical critic must be careful not to
take the biographical facts o f a writer’s life too far in criticizing the works of that writer: the
biographical critic “focuses on explicating the literary work by using the insight provided by
knowledge of the author’s life.... [B]iographical data should amplify the meaning of the text,
not drown it out with irrelevant material.”
 Historical Criticism: This approach “seeks to understand a literary work by investigating the
social, cultural, and intellectual context that produced it—a context that necessarily includes
the artist’s biography and milieu.” A key goal for historical critics is to understand the effect of
a literary work upon its original readers.
 Gender Criticism: This approach “examines how sexual identity influences the creation and
reception of literary works.” Originally an offshoot of feminist movements, gender criticism
today includes a number of approaches, including the so-called “masculinist” approach
recently advocated by poet Robert Bly. The bulk of gender criticism, however, is feminist and
takes as a central precept that the patriarchal attitudes that have dominated western thought
have resulted, consciously or unconsciously, in literature “full of unexamined ‘male-produced’
assumptions.” Feminist criticism attempts to correct this imbalance by analyzing and
combatting such attitudes—by questioning, for example, why none of the characters in
Shakespeare’s play Othello ever challenge the right of a husband to murder a wife accused of
adultery. Other goals of feminist critics include “analyzing how sexual identity influences the
reader of a text” and “examin[ing] how the images of men and women in imaginative literature
reflect or reject the social forces that have historically kept the sexes from achieving total
equality.”b b
 Psychological Criticism: This approach reflects the effect that modern psychology has had
upon both literature and literary criticism. Fundamental figures in psychological criticism
include Sigmund Freud, whose “psychoanalytic theories changed our notions of human
behavior by exploring new or controversial areas like wish-fulfillment, sexuality, the
unconscious, and repression” as well as expanding our understanding of how “language and
symbols operate by demonstrating their ability to reflect unconscious fears or desires”; and
Carl Jung, whose theories about the unconscious are also a key foundation of Mythological
Criticism. Psychological criticism has a number of approaches, but in general, it usually
employs one (or more) of three approaches:
1. An investigation of “the creative process of the artist: what is the nature of literary
genius and how does it relate to normal mental functions?”
2. The psychological study of a particular artist, usually noting how an author’s
biographical circumstances affect or influence their motivations and/or behavior.
3. The analysis of fictional characters using the language and methods of psychology.
 Sociological Criticism: This approach “examines literature in the cultural, economic and
political context in which it is written or received,” exploring the relationships between the artist
and society. Sometimes it examines the artist’s society to better understand the author’s
literary works; other times, it may examine the representation of such societal elements within
the literature itself. One influential type of sociological criticism is Marxist criticism, which
focuses on the economic and political elements of art, often emphasizing the ideological
 content of literature; because Marxist criticism often argues that all art is political, either
challenging or endorsing (by silence) the status quo, it is frequently evaluative and
judgmental, a tendency that “can lead to reductive judgment, as when Soviet critics rated Jack
London better than William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, and Henry James,
because he illustrated the principles of class struggle more clearly.” Nonetheless, Marxist
criticism “can illuminate political and economic dimensions of literature other approaches
overlook.”
 Mythological Criticism: This approach emphasizes “the recurrent universal patterns
underlying most literary works.” Combining the insights from anthropology, psychology,
history, and comparative religion, mythological criticism “explores the artist’s common
humanity by tracing how the individual imagination uses myths and symbols common to
different cultures and epochs.” One key concept in mythlogical criticism is the archetype, “a
symbol, character, situation, or image that evokes a deep universal response,” which entered
literary criticism from Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. According to Jung, all individuals share a
“‘collective unconscious,’ a set of primal memories common to the human race, existing below
each person’s conscious mind”—often deriving from primordial phenomena such as the sun,
moon, fire, night, and blood, archetypes according to Jung “trigger the collective
unconscious.” Another critic, Northrop Frye, defined archetypes in a more limited way as “a
symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an
element of one’s literary experience as a whole.” Regardless of the definition of archetype
they use, mythological critics tend to view literary works in the broader context of works
sharing a similar pattern.
 Reader-Response Criticism: This approach takes as a fundamental tenet that “literature”
exists not as an artifact upon a printed page but as a transaction between the physical text
and the mind of a reader. It attempts “to describe what happens in the reader’s mind while
interpreting a text” and reflects that reading, like writing, is a creative process. According to
reader-response critics, literary texts do not “contain” a meaning; meanings derive only from
the act of individual readings. Hence, two different readers may derive completely different
interpretations of the same literary text; likewise, a reader who re-reads a work years later
may find the work shockingly different. Reader-response criticism, then, emphasizes how
“religious, cultural, and social values affect readings; it also overlaps with gender criticism in
exploring how men and women read the same text with different assumptions.” Though this
approach rejects the notion that a single “correct” reading exists for a literary work, it does not
consider all readings permissible: “Each text creates limits to its possible interpretations.”
 Deconstructionist Criticism: This approach “rejects the traditional assumption that language
can accurately represent reality.” Deconstructionist critics regard language as a fundamentally
unstable medium—the words “tree” or “dog,” for instance, undoubtedly conjure up different
mental images for different people—and therefore, because literature is made up of words,
literature possesses no fixed, single meaning. According to critic Paul de Man,
deconstructionists insist on “the impossibility of making the actual expression coincide with
what has to be expressed, of making the actual signs [i.e., words] coincide with what is
signified.” As a result, deconstructionist critics tend to emphasize not what is being said
but how language is used in a text. The methods of this approach tend to resemble those
of formalist criticism, but whereas formalists’ primary goal is to locate unity within a text,
“how the diverse elements of a text cohere into meaning,” deconstructionists try to show how
the text “deconstructs,” “how it can be broken down ... into mutually irreconcilable positions.”
Other goals of deconstructionists include (1) challenging the notion of authors’ “ownership” of
texts they create (and their ability to control the meaning of their texts) and (2) focusing on
how language is used to achieve power, as when they try to understand how a some
interpretations of a literary work come to be regarded as “truth.”
1. Historical-Biographical approach can be defined as the approach that "...sees a literary work
chiefly, if not exclusively, as a reflection of the author's life and times or the life and times of the
characters in the work" (Guerin, 22). Understanding the social structure or way of life of a certain time
period give the reader a greater knowledge base from which to draw conclusions and better
understand the story. Discovering details about the author's life and times also provide similar ways
to further develop ideas about a story.

SAMPLE ANALYSIS USING THE HISTORICAL-BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH

THE HAMLET

If you use this style when approaching the text of the play, you might want to focus on the style of rule
in Denmark during Shakespeare's time. It would also be helpful to note the way revenge was viewed
by the people in England {The people whom these plays were written for} during this time. Revenge
was viewed as a sin against both God and the State. When one kills as an act of revenge it was
thought that God would be offended because he was the one that was supposed to control human
life. When someone was killed un-naturally it was perceived as a great violation of what was
accepted as right. How does this change the meaning of Prince Hamlet's choices in the play? Also,
one could examine the Catholic notion of Purgatory, and examine what role Purgatory played in the
newly Protestant England. Catholics viewed Purgatory as a middle ground between Heaven and Hell
where people could go to work off venial sins (or non-mortal sins, murder was a mortal sin). There
was no such thing as Purgatory in the Protestant religion. Audience members would have had to
decide whether to view the ghost of King Hamlet, who appears in Act I of the play, as a ghost sent
from a Purgatory they did not believe in to seek vengeance for his murder or whether they should
adhere to what their faith dictated and see the ghost as a demon sent from Hell to insight murder.
Using all these insights, a reader could begin to re-examine the character of Hamlet as well as some
of the other supporting players in the story.