Editing Literary theory (section)

==Schools==
Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors:

* [[Aestheticism]] – associated with [[Romanticism]], a philosophy defining aesthetic value as the primary goal in understanding literature. This includes both literary critics who have tried to understand and/or identify aesthetic values and those like Oscar Wilde who have stressed [[art for art's sake]].
** [[Oscar Wilde]], [[Walter Pater]], [[Harold Bloom]]
* African-American literary theory
* American [[pragmatism]] and other American approaches
** [[Harold Bloom]], [[Stanley Fish]], [[Richard Rorty]]
* [[Cognitive literary theory]] – applies research in [[cognitive science]] and [[philosophy of mind]] to the study of literature and culture.
** [[Frederick Luis Aldama]], Mary Thomas Crane, Nancy Easterlin, William Flesch, David Herman, [[Suzanne Keen]], Patrick Colm Hogan, Alan Richardson, [[Ellen Spolsky]], [[Blakey Vermeule]], [[Lisa Zunshine]]
* [[Cambridge criticism]] – close examination of the literary text and the relation of literature to social issues
**[[I.A. Richards]], [[F.R. Leavis]], [[Q.D. Leavis]], [[William Empson]].
* [[Critical race theory]]
* [[Cultural studies]] – emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life 
** [[Raymond Williams]], [[Dick Hebdige]], and [[Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)|Stuart Hall]] ([[British Cultural Studies]]); [[Max Horkheimer]] and [[Theodor Adorno]]; [[Michel de Certeau]]; also [[Paul Gilroy]], [[John Guillory]]
*[[Darwinian literary studies]] – situates literature in the context of evolution and natural selection
* [[Deconstruction]] – a strategy of "close" reading that elicits the ways that key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable
** [[Jacques Derrida]], [[Paul de Man]], [[J. Hillis Miller]], [[Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe]], [[Gayatri Spivak]], [[Avital Ronell]]
* [[Descriptive poetics]]
** [[Brian McHale]]
*[[Feminist literary criticism]]
* [[Eco-criticism]] – explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world
* [[Gender]] (see [[feminist literary criticism]]) – which emphasizes themes of gender relations
** [[Luce Irigaray]], [[Judith Butler]], [[Hélène Cixous]], [[Julia Kristeva]], [[Elaine Showalter]]
* [[Formalism (literature)|Formalism]] – a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text
* German [[hermeneutics]] and [[philology]]
** [[Friedrich Schleiermacher]], [[Wilhelm Dilthey]], [[Hans-Georg Gadamer]], [[Erich Auerbach]], [[René Wellek]]
* [[Marxism]] (see [[Marxist literary criticism]]) – which emphasizes themes of class conflict
** [[Georg Lukács]], [[Valentin Voloshinov]], [[Raymond Williams]], [[Terry Eagleton]], [[Fredric Jameson]], [[Theodor Adorno]], [[Walter Benjamin]]
* [[Narratology]]
* [[New Criticism]] – looks at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issues
** [[W. K. Wimsatt]], [[F. R. Leavis]], [[John Crowe Ransom]], [[Cleanth Brooks]], [[Robert Penn Warren]]
* [[New historicism]] – which examines the work through its historical context and seeks to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature
** [[Stephen Greenblatt]], [[Louis Montrose]], [[Jonathan Goldberg]], H. Aram Veeser
* [[Postcolonialism]] – focuses on the influences of [[colonialism]] in literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and [[indigenous peoples]] by [[Western nation]]s
** [[Edward Said]], [[Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak]], [[Homi K. Bhabha|Homi Bhabha]] and [[Declan Kiberd]]
* [[Postmodernism]] – criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the [[Other (philosophy)|Other]]
** [[Michel Foucault]], [[Roland Barthes]], [[Gilles Deleuze]], [[Félix Guattari]] and [[Maurice Blanchot]]
* [[Post-structuralism]] – a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as [[deconstruction]]) that criticize or go beyond [[Structuralism]]'s aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formations
** [[Roland Barthes]], [[Michel Foucault]], [[Julia Kristeva]]
* [[Psychoanalysis]] (see [[psychoanalytic literary criticism]]) – explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text
** [[Sigmund Freud]], [[Jacques Lacan]], [[Harold Bloom]], [[Slavoj Žižek]], [[Viktor Tausk]]
* [[Queer theory]] – examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and sexuality in literature
** [[Judith Butler]], [[Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick]], [[Michel Foucault]]
* [[Reader-response criticism]] – focuses upon the active response of the reader to a text
** [[Louise Rosenblatt]], [[Wolfgang Iser]], [[Norman Holland]], [[Hans-Robert Jauss]], [[Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)|Stuart Hall]]
* [[Realism (arts)|Realist]]
**[[James Wood (critic)|James Wood]]
* [[Russian formalism]]
**[[Victor Shklovsky]], [[Vladimir Propp]]
* [[Structuralism]] and [[semiotics]] (see [[semiotic literary criticism]]) – examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any structures
** [[Ferdinand de Saussure]], [[Roman Jakobson]], [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]], [[Roland Barthes]], [[Mikhail Bakhtin]], [[Juri Lotman]], [[Umberto Eco]], [[Jacques Ehrmann]], [[Northrop Frye]] and [[Morphology (folkloristics)|morphology of folklore]]
* Other theorists: [[Robert Graves]], [[Alamgir Hashmi]], [[John Sutherland (author)|John Sutherland]], [[Leslie Fiedler]], [[Kenneth Burke]], [[Paul Bénichou]], [[Barbara Johnson]]