Literary Theory Glossary

A method of careful, detailed textual analysis that examines language, imagery, syntax, and formal features to interpret meaning.

A critical strategy developed by Jacques Derrida that exposes the internal contradictions and instabilities within texts and philosophical systems.

Viktor Shklovsky's concept that literary language makes the familiar strange, restoring fresh perception to habituated experience.

In Foucault's usage, the systems of language, knowledge, and power that govern what can be said, thought, and known in a given historical period.

A critical approach examining the relationship between literature and the natural environment, including representations of nature and ecological themes.

An approach that analyzes gender representation in literature, challenges patriarchal structures in texts and literary traditions, and recovers women's voices.

The study of literature based primarily on its formal and linguistic properties rather than its content, historical context, or authorial biography.

Antonio Gramsci's concept describing how dominant groups maintain power through cultural and ideological consent rather than coercion alone.

The theory and methodology of interpretation, especially of literary, biblical, and philosophical texts. Concerned with how meaning is derived from texts.

A system of beliefs and values that shapes perception of reality. In literary theory, ideology refers to the often invisible assumptions embedded in and reinforced by texts.

The network of relationships between texts, whereby every text is shaped by its references to, echoes of, and transformations of other texts.

A critical approach that analyzes literature in terms of class struggle, commodity relations, ideology, and the material conditions of production.

The concept, originating with Aristotle, that literature imitates or represents reality. Central to debates about literary realism.

The systematic study of narrative structures, including plot, focalization, narrative voice, temporality, and the distinction between story and discourse.

A formalist movement in Anglo-American criticism emphasizing close reading of the text as an autonomous, self-sufficient object.

A critical approach that reads literary texts in dialogue with non-literary texts from the same period, emphasizing the mutual shaping of literature and history.

Edward Said's term for the Western system of representing 'the East' in ways that exoticize, essentialize, and subordinate non-Western peoples and cultures.

A broad intellectual movement that challenges structuralism's claims to stable systems of meaning, emphasizing the play, instability, and multiplicity of meaning.

A theoretical framework for analyzing the cultural, literary, and political legacies of colonialism and imperialism.

A critical approach that applies theories of the unconscious, repression, and desire (Freud, Lacan) to the interpretation of literary texts.

A critical approach that challenges normative categories of gender and sexuality, analyzing how texts construct, reinforce, or subvert sexual and gender norms.

A school of criticism that locates meaning not in the text alone but in the transaction between text and reader.

The study of signs and sign systems, including how meaning is produced and communicated through language, images, and cultural codes.

An intellectual movement analyzing cultural phenomena as systems of signs governed by underlying structures and rules, rooted in Saussure's linguistics.

The body of literary works traditionally considered most important or authoritative in a culture's literary heritage, subject to ongoing debates about inclusion and exclusion.