Imperialism

This development was the result of the growth of monopoly capitalism in the metropolitan countries, involving the fusion of finance with manufacturing capital-the epoch of imperialism, which was analysed by Lenin. National markets became too small for the giant monopolies as they swallowed up their weaker competitors, expanded production to new heights, and looked for new and profitable areas for investment.

In the case of India, this process really got going at the end of the nineteenth century when capital was exported from Britain to build up a modern Indian-based textile industry, mainly under British ownership.

"One capitalist kills many", as Marx says. Capitalism destroys not only petty production, but also continually bankrupts the weakest of its own brethren and jettisons them into the ranks of the propertyless.

This is a two-sided process - progressive in its objective economic content, by piling up enormous productive resources for the potential benefit of mankind, but, under capitalism, concentrating colossal power in the hands of a tiny handful of rich magnates. At the end of the nineteenth century we saw the development of monopoly out of competition itself.

The banking system, Marx wrote, "places all the available and even potential capital of society that is not already actively employed at the disposal of the industrial and commercial capitalists, so that neither the lenders nor users of this capital are its real owners or producers. It thus does away with the private character of capital and thus contains in itself, but only in itself, the abolition of capital itself... Finally there is no doubt that the credit system will serve as a powerful lever during the transition from the capitalist mode of production to the mode of production of associated labour, but only as one element in connection with other great organic revolutions of the mode of production itself."

Capitalism continually requires infusions of money capital in order for profit-making to continue uninterruptedly. Once a stock of commodities has been produced, a single capitalist would either have to wait till he had sold them before he once again had money in his pocket to restart production; or he would have to keep stocks of money-capital idle much of the time as a reserve for investment when needed; he would have to continually pay money into a fund to renew stocks of fixed capital which might be idle for ten or twenty years.

In reality, a stratum of capitalist hangers-on develop, not prepared to invest directly in production, but quite prepared to lend their money in order to cut themselves a slice of the pie of surplus-value. So there is a tendency for competition to generate unused reserves of money capital. These reserves are collected in a few rich hands - concentrations of finance capital.

Finance capital initially provided a stimulus to the capitalist system by gathering and siphoning money-capital into production. It did so, of course, only to cream off an increasing proportion of the surplus value for itself.

As Marx pointed out, finance capital also concentrates tremendous economic power in its own hands, and effectively integrates the individual manufacturing capitalist into the requirements of capitalist production as a whole through allocation and withdrawal of credits.

Imperialism is the epoch in which finance capital has fused with monopoly capital involved in production.

Under imperialism, while competition between capitalists within the boundaries of the nation-state has not been completely done away with, conflict has spilt over into the international arena.

The big monopolies and the banks exported capital rather than just commodities. A massive programme of railway building was undertaken in every continent and clime. Loans were floated for the most far-flung places. A systematic search was undertaken for every kind of raw material and mineral resource.

Conflicts now began between national capital blocs. The struggle was for nothing less than mastery of the world. Wars unparalleled in ferocity in the history of mankind broke out for colonies and a redivision of imperial spoils.

The first world war indicated that capitalism, like previous forms of class society, had ceased to be progressive. Instead of taking production forward, there was mass destruction and mass murder.

But at the same time, a new society was developing within the old. The Russian revolution served notice that the rule of the working class was at hand.

Primitive Communism

In the earliest stages of society people did not go into factories, work to produce things they would not normally consume, and be 'rewarded' at the end of the week with pieces of coloured paper or decorated discs which other people would be quite prepared to accept in exchange for the food, clothing, etc., which they needed. Such behaviour would have struck our remote ancestors as quite fantastic.

Nor did many of the other features of modern society we so much take for granted exist. What socialist has not heard the argument "People are bound to be greedy and grabbing. You can't get socialism because you can't change human nature?" In fact, society divided into classes has existed for no more than about 10,000 years-one hundredth of the time mankind has been on this planet. For the other 99% of the time there was no class society, that is, no enforced inequalities, no state, and no family in the modern sense.

This was not because primitive people were unaccountably more noble than us, but because production relations produced a different sort of society, and so a different 'human nature'. Being determines consciousness, and if people's social being changes - if the society they live under changes - then their consciousness will also change.

The basis of primitive society was gathering and hunting. The only division of labour was that between men and women for the entirely natural biological reason that women were burdened much of the time with young children. They gathered vegetable foods while the men hunted.

Thus each sex played an important part in production. On the basis of studying tribes such as the !Kung in the Kalahari desert, who still live under primitive communist conditions, it has been estimated that the female contribution to the food supply may well have been more important than the male's. Women were held in high esteem in such societies. They contributed at least equally to the wealth of the tribe. They developed separate skills - it seems women invented pottery and even made the crucial breakthrough to agriculture

All these tribal societies had features in common. The hunting grounds were regarded as the common property of the tribe. How could they be anything else when hunting itself is a collective activity? The very insecurity of existence leads to sharing. It's no good hiding a dead hippo from your mates--you won't be able to eat it before it rots anyway, and there may well come a time when other tribe members have a superfluity while you're in distress. It's common sense to share and share alike.

Private property did exist in personal implements, but in the most different tribal societies there existed similar rules to burn or bury these with the body of the owner, in order to prevent the accumulation of inequality.

No such institution as the state was necessary, for there were no fundamental antagonistic class interests tearing society apart. Individual disputes could be sorted out within the tribe. Old men with experience certainly played leading parts in the decision-making of the tribe. They were chiefs, however, and not kings--their authority was deserved or it did not exist. As late as the third century AD (when it was ceasing to be true) Athanaric, leader of the German tribe, the Visigoths, said: "I have authority, not power".

Society developed because it had to. Beginning in tropical Africa, as population grew to cover more inhospitable parts of the globe, people had to use their power of thought and labour to develop - or die. From gathering fruit, nuts, etc., it was a step forward to cultivating the land - actually ensuring that vegetable food was to hand. From hunting it was a step to husbandry, penning in the animals. Tribal society remained the norm.

Historical Materialism

Historical Materialism is the application of Marxist science to historical development. The fundamental proposition of historical materialism can be summed up in a sentence: "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness." (Marx, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.)

What does this mean? Readers of the Daily Mirror will be familiar with the "Perishers" cartoon strip. In one incident the old dog, Wellington wanders down to a pool full of crabs. The crabs speculate about the mysterious divinity, the "eyeballs in the sky," which appears to them.

The point is, that is actually how you would look at things if your universe were a pond. Your consciousness is determined by your being. Thought is limited by the range of experience of the species.

We know very little about how primitive people thought, but we know what they couldn't have been thinking about. They wouldn't have wandered about wondering what the football results were, for instance. League football presupposes big towns able to get crowds large enough to pay professional footballers and the rest of the club staff. Industrial towns in their turn can only emerge when the productivity of labour has developed to the point where a part of society can be fed by the rest, and devote themselves to producing other requirements than food.

In other words, an extensive division of labour must exist. The other side of this is that people must be accustomed to working for money and buying the things they want from others - including tickets to the football - which, of course, was not the case in primitive society.

So this simple example shows how even things like professional football are dependent on the way society makes its daily bread, on people's "social existence".

After all, what is mankind? The great idealist philosopher Hegel said that "man, is a thinking being." Actually Hegel's view was a slightly more sophisticated form of the usual religious view that man is endowed by his Creator with a brain to admire His handiwork. It is true that thinking is one way we are different from dung beetles, sticklebacks and lizards. But why did humans develop the capacity to think?

Over a hundred years ago, Engels pointed out that upright posture marked the transition from ape to man, a completely materialist explanation. This view has been confirmed by the more recent researches of anthropologists such as Leakey. Upright posture liberated the hands for gripping with an opposable thumb. This enabled tools to be used and developed.

Upright posture also allowed early humans to rely more on the eyes, rather than the other senses, for sensing the world around. The use of the hands developed the powers of the brain through the medium of the eyes.

Engels was a dialectical materialist. In no way did he minimise the importance of thought - rather he explained how it arose. We can also see that Benjamin Franklin, the eighteenth-century US politician and inventor, was much nearer a materialist approach than Hegel when he defined man as a "tool-making animal."

Darwin showed a hundred years ago that there is a struggle for existence, and species survive through natural selection. At first sight early humans didn't have a lot going for them, compared with the speed of the cheetah, the strength of the lion, or the sheer intimidating bulk of the elephant. Yet humans came to dominate the planet and, more recently, to drive many of these more fearsome animals to the point of extinction.

What differentiates humanity from the lower animals is that, however self-reliant animals such as lions may seem, they ultimately just take external nature around them for granted, whereas, mankind progressively masters nature.

The process whereby mankind masters nature is labour. At Marx's grave, Engels stated that his friend's great discovery was that "mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, and therefore work before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion etc."

While we can't read the minds of our primitive human ancestors, we can make a pretty good guess about what they were thinking most of the time - food. The struggle against want has dominated history ever since.

Marxists are often accused of being 'economic determinists'. Actually, Marxists are far from denying the importance of ideas or the active role of individuals in history. But precisely because we are active, we understand the limits of individual activity, and the fact that the appropriate social conditions must exist before our ideas and our activity can be effective.

Our academic opponents are generally passive cynics who exalt individual activity amid the port and walnuts from over-stuffed armchairs. We understand, with Marx that people "make their own history...but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past". We need to understand how society is developing in order to intervene in the process. That is what we mean when we say Marxism is the science of perspectives.

We have seen that labour distinguishes mankind from the other animals - that mankind progressively changes nature through labour, and in doing so changes itself. It follows that there is a real measure of progress through all the miseries and pitfalls of human history - the increasing ability of men and women to master nature and subjugate it to their own requirements: in other words, the increasing productivity of labour.

To each stage in the development of the productive forces corresponds a certain set of production relations. Production relation means the way people organise themselves to gain their daily bread. Production relations are thus the skeleton of every form of society. They provide the conditions of social existence that determine human consciousness.

Marx explained how the development of the productive forces brings into existence different production relations, and different forms of class society.

By a 'class' we mean a group of people in society with the same relationship to the means of production. The class which owns and controls the means of production rules society. This, at the same time, enables it to force the oppressed or labouring class to toil in the rulers' interests. The labouring class is forced to produce a surplus which the ruling class lives off.

Marx explained:

"The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves; thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers-a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity-which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short the corresponding specific form of the state." (Capital, Vol. III.)

Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation. Ecocriticism was officially heralded by the publication of two seminal works, both published in the mid-1990s: The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, and The Environmental Imagination, by Lawrence Buell.

In the United States, Ecocriticism is often associated with the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), which hosts biennial meetings for scholars who deal with environmental matters in literature. ASLE has an official journal—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE)—in which much of the most current American scholarship in the rapidly evolving field of ecocriticism can be found.

Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including "green (cultural) studies", "ecopoetics", and "environmental literary criticism".

Ecocritics investigate such things as the underlying ecological values, what, precisely, is meant by the word nature, and whether the examination of "place" should be a distinctive category, much like class, gender or race. Ecocritics examine human perception of wilderness, and how it has changed throughout history and whether or not current environmental issues are accurately represented or even mentioned in popular culture and modern literature. Other disciplines, such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology, are also considered by ecocritics to be possible contributors to ecocriticism.

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism (Barry 240). In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism. His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” (Reprinted in The Ecocritism Reader on p. 107)

Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the ecological/environmental side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies etc. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature in 1973, The Country and the City, which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre and its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism.

Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy; that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the former to moral predominance. Such 'anthropocentrism' is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker asserts, shows that a "comic mode" of muddling through and "making love not war" has superior ecological value. In the later, "second wave" ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological and historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.

As Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed…Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, ecocriticism—unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms—failed to crystallize into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s.

In the mid 1980s, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function. In 1990, at the University of Nevada in Reno, Glotfelty became the first person to hold an academic position as a professor of Literature and the Environment, and UNR has retained the position it established at that time as the intellectual home of ecocriticism even as ASLE has burgeoned into an organization with thousands of members in the US alone. From the late 1990s, new branches of ASLE and affiliated organizations were started in the UK, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, India, Taiwan, Canada and Europe.

Poststrcturalism

Post-structuralism is a school of thought that emerged partly from within French structuralism in the 1960s, reacting against structuralist pretensions to scientific objectivity and comprehensiveness. The term covers the philosophical deconstruction practised by Jacques Derrida and his followers, along with the later works of the critic Roland Barthes, the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, the historical critiques of Michel Foucault, and the cultural-political writings of Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. These thinkers emphasized the instability of meanings and of intellectual categories (including that of the human ‘subject’), and sought to undermine any theoretical system that claimed to have universal validity – such claims being denounced as ‘totalitarian’. They set out to dissolve the fixed binary oppositions of structuralist thought, including that between language and metalanguage – and thus between literature and criticism. 

It should be noticed that metalanguage is regarded as any use of language about language, for example in glosses, definitions, or arguments about the usage or meaning of words. Linguistics sometimes describes itself as a metalanguage because it is a ‘language’ about language; and so on the same assumption criticism is a metalanguage about literature. Some theorists of structuralism have spoken of metalanguages as if they were clearly separate from or standing above the ‘object-languages’ they describe, but this claim is denied by post-structuralism, which points out that linguistics, criticism, etc. Are still within the same general language, albeit as specialized uses with their own terminologies. Thus there is in principle no absolute distinction between criticism and literature. It is also possible to have a meta-metalanguage, i.e. a ‘third-level’ discourse such as an analysis of linguistics, or a work of metacriticism.

Metacriticism is criticism of criticism; i.e. the examination of the principles, methods, and terms of criticism either in general (as in critical theory) or in the study of particular critics or critical debates. The term usually implies a consideration of the principles underlying critical interpretation and judgement.

Instead they favoured a non-hierarchical plurality of ‘free play’ of meanings, stressing the indeterminacy of texts. Although waning in French intellectual life by the end of the 1970s, post-structuralism’s delayed influence upon literary and cultural theory in the English-speaking world has persisted.

Deconstruction

Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole. As J. Hillis Miller, the preeminent American deconstructor, has explained in an essay entitled "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure" (1976), "Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock but thin air."

Deconstruction was both created and has been profoundly influenced by the French philosopher on language Jacques Derrida. Derrida, who coined the term deconstruction, argues that in Western culture, people tend to think and express their thoughts in terms of binary oppositions. Something is white but not black, masculine and therefore not feminine, a cause rather than an effect. Other common and mutually exclusive pairs include beginning/end, conscious/unconscious, presence/absence, and speech/writing. Derrida suggests these oppositions are hierarchies in miniature, containing one term that Western culture views as positive or superior and another considered negative or inferior, even if only slightly so. Through deconstruction, Derrida aims to erase the boundary between binary oppositions—and to do so in such a way that the hierarchy implied by the oppositions is thrown into question.

Although its ultimate aim may be to criticize Western logic, deconstruction arose as a response to structuralism and formalism. Structuralists believed that all elements of human culture, including literature, may be understood as parts of a system of signs. Derrida did not believe that structuralists could explain the laws governing human signification and thus provide the key to understanding the form and meaning of everything from an African village to Greek myth to a literary text. He also rejected the structuralist belief that texts have identifiable "centers" of meaning—a belief structuralists shared with formalists.

Formalist critics, such as the New Critics, assume that a work of literature is a freestanding, self-contained object whose meaning can be found in the complex network of relations between its parts (allusions, images, rhythms, sounds, etc.). Deconstructors, by contrast, see works in terms of their undecidability. They reject the formalist view that a work of literary art is demonstrably unified from beginning to end, in one certain way, or that it is organized around a single center that ultimately can be identified. As a result, deconstructors see texts as more radically heterogeneous than do formalists. Formalists ultimately make sense of the ambiguities they find in a given text, arguing that every ambiguity serves a definite, meaningful, and demonstrable literary function. Undecidability, by contrast, is never reduced, let alone mastered. Though a deconstructive reading can reveal the incompatible possibilities generated by the text, it is impossible for the reader to decide among them.

Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supriya M. Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford Books.

New Historicism

Historical Criticism insisted that to understand a literary piece, we need to understand the author's biography and social background, ideas circulating at the time, and the cultural milieu. This school of criticism fell into disfavor as the New Critics emerged.

New Historicism seeks to find meaning in a text by considering the work within the framework of the prevailing ideas and assumptions of its historical era. New Historicists concern themselves with the political function of literature and with the concept of power, the intricate means by which cultures produce and reproduce themselves. These critics focus on revealing the historically specific model of truth and authority (not a "truth" but a "cultural construct") reflected in a given work.

In other words, history here is not a mere chronicle of facts and events, but rather a complex description of human reality and evolution of preconceived notions. Literary works may or may not tell us about various factual aspects of the world from which they emerge, but they will tell us about prevailing ways of thinking at the time: ideas of social organization, prejudices, taboos, etc. They raise questions of interest to anthropologists and sociologists.

New Historicism is more "sociohistorical" than it is a delving into factoids: concerned with ideological products or cultural constructs which are formations of any era. (It's not just where Keats would have seen a Grecian urn in England, but from where he may have absorbed the definitions of art and beauty.)

So, New Historicists, insisting that ideology manifests itself in literary productions and discourse, interest themselves in the interpretive constructions which the members of a society or culture apply to their experience.

Psychoanalytic Criticism

Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express secret unconscious desires and anxieties. Earlier approaches to psychoanalytic criticism argued that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. However, it is now more common for psychoanalytic criticism to focus on the motivations and conflicts that determine the predicaments of characters within a work of literature.

One interesting facet of this approach is that it validates the importance of literature, as it is built on a literary key for the decoding. Freud himself wrote, "The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech" (26).

Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, and so forth within what may well be a disunified literary work. Again, the earlier approach to psychoanalytic criticism would seek to show how the author's own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such are traceable within the behavior of the characters in the literary work. The more contemporary approach would focus more on how the characters’ childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, etc. shape their behavior with the literary work. In either case, psychological material will be expressed indirectly, disguised, or encoded (as in dreams) through principles such as "symbolism" (the repressed object represented in disguise), "condensation" (several thoughts or persons represented in a single image), and "displacement" (anxiety located onto another image by means of association).

Psychoanalytic criticism is similar to New Criticism in not concerning itself with "what the author [or character] intended." Rather, what the author [or character] never intended (that is, repressed) is sought. The unconscious material has been distorted by the censoring conscious mind.

Psychoanalytic critics will ask such questions as, "What is Hamlet's problem?" or "Why can't Brontë seem to portray any positive mother figures?"

Dialogic Criticism

Dialogic Criticism is modelled on the theory and critical procedures of the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin who, although he published his major works in the 1920s and 1930s, remained virtually unknown to the West until the 1980s, when translations of his writings gave him a wide and rapidly increasing influence. To Bakhtin a literary work is not (as in various poststructural theories) a text whose meanings are produced by the play of impersonal linguistic or economic or cultural forces, but a site for the dialogic interaction of multiple voices, or modes of discourse, each of which is not merely a verbal but a social phenomenon, and as such is the product of manifold determinants that are specific to a class, social group, and speech community. A person's speech, composed of languages from diverse social contexts, does not express a ready-made and autonomous individuality; instead, his or her character emerges in the course of the dialogue and is composed of languages from diverse social contexts. Each utterance, furthermore, whether in actual life or as represented in literature, owes its precise inflection and meaning to a number of attendant factors—the specific social situation in which it is spoken, the relation of its speaker to an actual or anticipated listener, and the relation of the utterance to the prior utterances to which it is (explicitly or implicitly) a response.

Bakhtin's prime interest was in the novel, and especially in the ways that the voices that constitute the text of any novel disrupt the authority of the author's single voice. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929, trans, by Caryl Emerson, 1984), he contrasts the monologic novels of writers such as Leo Tolstoy— which undertake to subordinate the voices of all the characters to the authoritative discourse and controlling purposes of the author—to the dialogic form (or "polyphonic form") of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels, in which the characters are liberated to speak "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices." In Bakhtin's view, however, a novel can never be totally monologic, since the narrator's reports of the utterances of another character are inescapably "double-voiced" (in that we can distinguish therein the author's own accent and inflection), and also dialogic (in that the author's discourse continually reinforces, alters, or contests with the types of speech that it reports). 

In Rabelais and His World (trans., 1984), Bakhtin proposed his widely cited concept of the carnivalesque in certain literary works. This literary mode parallels the flouting of authority and inversion of social hierarchies that, in many cultures, are permitted in a season of carnival. It does so by introducing a mingling of voices from diverse social levels that are free to mock and subvert authority, to flout social norms by ribaldry, and to exhibit various ways of profaning what is ordinarily regarded as sacrosanct. Bakhtin traces the occurrence of the camivalesque in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance writers (especially in Rabelais); he also asserts that the mode recurs later, especially in the play of irreverent, parodie, and subversive voices in the novels of Dostoevsky, which are both dialogic and camivalesque. In an essay on "Discourse in the Novel" (1934-35), Bakhtin develops his view that the novel is constituted by a multiplicity of divergent and contending social voices that achieve their full significance only in the process of their dialogic interaction both with each other and with the voice of the narrator. 

Bakhtin explicitly sets his theory against Aristotle's Poetics, which proposed that the primary component in narrative forms is a plot that evolves coherently from its beginning to an end in which all complications are resolved. Instead, Bakhtin elevates discourse (equivalent to Aristotle's subordinate element of diction) into the primary component of a narrative work; and he describes discourse as a medley of voices, social attitudes, and values that are not only opposed, but irreconcilable, with the result that the work remains unresolved and open-ended. Although he wrote during the Stalinist regime in Russia, Bakhtin's libertarian and open concept of the literary narrative is obviously, although tacitly, opposed to the Soviet version of Marxist criticism, which stresses the way a novel either reflects or distorts the true social reality, or expresses only a single dominant ideology, or should exemplify a "social realism" that accords with an authoritarian party line. See Marxist criticism and, for a discussion of the complex issue of Bakhtin's relation to Marxism and Soviet literary criticism, Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (1995), pp. 8-21.

Bakhtin's views have been, in some part and in diverse ways, incorporated by representatives of various types of critical theory and practice, whether traditional or poststructural. Among current students of literature, those who are identified specifically as "dialogic critics" follow Bakhtin's example by proposing that the primary component in the constitution of narrative works, or of literature generally—and of general culture as well—is a plurality of contending and mutually qualifying social voices, with no possibility of a decisive resolution into a monologic truth. Self-reflexively, a thoroughgoing dialogic critic, in accordance with Bakhtin's own views, considers his own critical writings to be simply one voice among many in the contention of critical theories and practices, which coexist in a sustained tension of opposition and mutual definition. As Don Bialostosky, a chief spokesman for dialogic criticism, has voiced its rationale and ideal: As a self-conscious practice, dialogic criticism turns its inescapable involvement with some other voices into a program of articulating itself with all the other voices of the discipline, the culture, or the world of cultures to which it makes itself responsible.... Neither a live-and-let live relativism nor a settle-it-once-and-for-all authoritarianism but a strenuous and open-ended dialogism would keep them talking to themselves and to one another, discovering their affinities without resting in them and clarifying their differences without resolving them.

Postcolonialism

Post-colonialism as a literary theory, emerged in the late 19th century and thrived throughout the 20th century. Post-colonialism is a literary approach that gives a kind of psychological relief to the people (the colonized) for whom it was born.

The focus of the Post-colonial critic is to expose the mechanism and the evil effect(s) of that monster called colonialism on the colonized. Colonialism which is the capitalistic and exploitative method by a ‘superior’ nation (colonizer) to lord itself over a less privileged nation (colonized) leads to the impoverishment of the latter. The concept of colonialism has political, economic and cultural implications.

Post-colonialism sees literature as an avenue to probe into the history of society by recreating its past experience with the mind of forestalling the repetition of history. The ultimate for the Post-colonial critic is to develop a kind of nostalgia about his historical moment that produces a new dawn in his society.

Post-colonialism is a dominant feature in African and Caribbean literature as writers in these settings see colonialism as an instrument of reducing them to nonentities.  An interesting feature of Post-colonial criticism is its attempt, not only to expose the oddities of colonialism but to reveal and discuss what the independent nations make of themselves even after the demise of colonialism. Works of the celebrated Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe like A Man of the People (1966), the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah like the Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) and the Jamaican novelist Jamaica Kincaid like A Small Place (1988) and the Nigerian playwright and theatre practitioner – Olu Obafemi like Suicide Syndrome (1986) are all interesting to the Post-colonial critic.

Marxism

Fundamentally anchored on the work of Karl Marx, Marxism is a dominant critical theory born in the middle of the 19th century and flourished tremendously throughout the twentieth century. Concerned about historical and cultural issues, Marxism identifies social and economic factors as crucial denominators of relationship in society. Karl Marx saw a capitalist society as basically a class society where the oppression of a class by another is perpetrated. He was an avowed adversary of oppression in whatever form. Thus he joined the proletariat (working class) to advocate for the abolition of class oppression.

The philosophy of Marxism is rooted in what is known as dialectical materialism, which stresses economic determinism (economic survival) as an index of social struggles. The Marxist ideologues believe that all social struggles are economy-based whose resolution stirs conflicts among the different classes inhabiting a social milieu.

Society is divided into two broad classes; the oppressor and the oppressed, who in Marx parlance are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat respectively. Because the former holds the means of production, it becomes dominant and hence oppresses the latter.

Bayo Lawal (1989), summarises the focus of Marxism in the context of human activity “based on the infrastructure which can be broadly divided into (a) forces of production and (b) productive relations”. He goes further to see work as being crucial to human existence and relevance, in the capitalist world; work is grossly misused and abused by the oppressors. He expresses this in the following words:

In the capitalist system, work or labour, is deceitful because, in Marx’s view man likes to be proud of what he creates and in the capitalist society, the fruits of Man’s creative ability are for capitalists. Man therefore, becomes estranged from what he produces. He is also alienated from the person who gets what he creates from him to sell at a price very higher than the cost of production ………. to strengthen and ensure the exploitative connection. Bayo Lawal (1989:126).

What Marxist writers (poets, playwrights and novelists) do is to expose the oppressors’ class and its mechanism of oppression. This is realized as settings, themes, characters and events conflating are discussed thereby creating the avenue for the Marxist critics to demonstrate their craft.
The above is the reason Marxist critics see the history of society as the history of class struggles and also explain the class struggles and antagonism predominant in a capitalist society.

The interest of Marxist literature is to defend the cause of the oppressed. The Marxist critics believe that the achievement of this goal is by evolving an egalitarian society where the ideal is stressed. To achieve this, they explore society and situate sources of oppression. They identify and critique elements of exploitation, alienation and other indices of oppression. They go beyond critiquing to also proffer panacea to the crises engendered by social parity.

For instance, a Marxist critique of Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood (1962) sees the White colonial owners of the Railway system as the oppressors and the Black indigenous Railway workers as the oppressed. While the members of the ruling class (the colonial masters) employ various draconian methods to oppress the colonized, the oppressed class in the novel employs strike and other revolutionary approaches to assert its protest against the oppressive syndrome.

Feminism

Feminism is an attempt by the women-folk to universally liberate itself from male chauvinism and patriarchy. While the shift is not intended to cause gender terrorism, it aims at making the position of women at home, at work, at school, in the street etc more challenging to themselves and their men-folk in the social phenomenon. This iconoclastic and radical approach pursues the ambition of making women to gain equality with men. The radical posture of Feminist criticism is reflected in its dissatisfaction with the place of women in global social and cultural situations. Because of its interest in social issues, Feminism, like Marxism, is historical, political and it proposes a dynamic ideological commitment.

The Feminist literary critic’s interest is to pursue the cause of women in literary texts. This is accomplished as women authors write novels, plays and poems. Furthermore, the Feminist literary writers feature and make women characters and ideas dominant in their works. Such writers endeavour to propagate Feminist thought, female concerns, ideas “and accomplishments and to recover the largely unrecorded and unknown history of women in earlier times”. Jerome Beaty (2002:A25). Prominent  among Feminist critics are Virjinia Woolf and Betty Raynolds, the American authors of Contemporary Writers (1965), and Setting the Record Straight (2001) respectively, the Jamaican novelist and the author of A Small Place (1988), Jamaica Kincaid, the British feminist theatre practitioner and critic and the editor of Feminist Theatre and Theory (1996) - Helene Keyssar.

In the African Feminist literary scenario, we have the Ghanaian playwright and theatre practitioner and the author of The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) Ama Ata Aidoo, the Nigerian playwright, theatre practitioner and the author of Old Wives are Tasty (1991) - Zulu Sofola, the Nigerian novelists and the authors of The Joys of Motherhood (1979) and Condolences (2002) - Buchi Emecheta and Bina Nengi – Ilagha respectively. An endearing and enduring peculiarity of these Feminist critics and writers is their ability to design a concept best referred to as ‘Feminocracy’ – the art of the women, by the women and for the women.

An interesting aspect of Feminism is the conscious or unconscious interest of male writers to assert the position of women in the social phenomenon. For instance, a critical reading of Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood (1962) and Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel (1964) would be shallow without paying attention, to the influence of the women-folk in the strike action in the novel and the roles played by Sidi and Sadiku in the play respectively.

Structuralism

Structuralism is a mode of thinking and a method of analysis practiced in 20th-century social sciences and humanities. Methodologically, it analyzes large-scale systems by examining the relations and functions of the smallest constituent elements of such systems, which range from human languages and cultural practices to folktales and literary texts.
In the field of linguistics the structuralist work of Ferdinand de Saussure, undertaken just prior to World War I, long served as model and inspiration. Characteristic of structuralist thinking, Saussure's linguistic inquiry was centered not on speech itself but on the underlying rules and conventions enabling language to operate. In analyzing the social or collective dimension of language rather than individual speech, he pioneered and promoted study of grammar rather than usage, rules rather than expressions, models rather than data, langue (language) rather than parole (speech). Saussure was interested in the infrastructure of language that is common to all speakers and that functions on an unconscious level. His inquiry was concerned with deep structures rather than surface phenomena and made no reference to historical evolution. (In structuralist terminology, it was synchronic existing now, rather than diachronic, existing and changing over time.)
In the domain of anthropology and myth studies, the work done in the immediate post-World War II period by Claude Levi-Strauss introduced structuralist principles to a wide audience. Following the ideas of Saussure and of the Slavic linguists N. S. Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson, Levi-Strauss specified four procedures basic to structuralism. First, structural analysis examines unconscious infrastructures of cultural phenomena; second, it regards the elements of infrastructures as "relational," not as independent entities; third, it attends singlemindedly to system; and fourth, it propounds general laws accounting for the underlying organizing patterns of phenomena.
In humanistic and literary studies, structuralism is applied most effectively in the field of "narratology." This nascent discipline studies all narratives, whether or not they use language: myths and legends, novels and news accounts, histories, relief sculptures and stained-glass windows, pantomimes and psychological case studies. Using structuralist methods and principles, narratologists analyze the systematic features and functions of narratives, attempting to isolate a finite set of rules to account for the infinite set of real and possible narratives. Starting in the 1960s, the French critic Roland Barthes and several other French narratologists popularized the field, which has since become an important method of analysis in the United States as well.
Because structuralism values deep structures over surface phenomena, it parallels, in part, the views of Marx and Freud, both of whom were concerned with underlying causes, unconscious motivations, and transpersonal forces, shifting attention away from individual human consciousness and choice. Like Marxism and Freudianism, therefore, structuralism furthers the ongoing modern diminishment of the individual, portraying the self largely as a construct and consequence of impersonal systems. Individuals neither originate nor control the codes and conventions of their social existence, mental life, or linguistic experience. As a result of its demotion of the person, or subject, structuralism is widely regarded as "antihumanistic."
Saussure envisaged a new discipline, a science of signs and sign systems that he named semiology, and for which he believed structural linguistics could provide a principal methodology. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, Saussure's contemporary, sketched a similar science labeled semiotic. In 1961, Levi-Strauss situated structural anthropology within the domain of "semiology." Increasingly, the terms semiology and Semiotics came to designate a field of study that analyzes sign systems, codes, and conventions of all kinds, from human to animal and sign languages, from the jargon of fashion to the lexicon of food, from the rules of folk narrative to those of phonological systems, from codes of architecture and medicine to the conventions of myth and literature. The term semiotics has gradually replaced structuralism, and the formation of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in the 1960s has solidified the trend.
At the moment when structuralist methodology was expanding into the discipline of semiotics, critical reaction occurred, particularly in France, where it led to such antithetical and schismatic projects as Gilles Deleuze's "schizoanalysis," Jacques Derrida's Deconstruction, Michel Foucault's "genealogy," and Julia Kristeva's "semanalysis." These critical schools were lumped together and labeled poststructuralism in the United States.
Despite the various critiques of structuralism, it has generated much important work and holds promise of continuing to do so.

New Criticism

This term, set current by the publication of John Crowe Ransom's The New Criticism in 1941, came to be applied to a theory and practice that was prominent in American literary criticism until late in the 1960s. The movement derived in considerable part from elements in I. A Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929) and from the critical essays of T. S. Eliot. It opposed the prevailing interest of scholars, critics, and teachers of that era in the biographies of authors, the social context of literature, and literary history by insisting that the proper concern of literary criticism is not with the external circumstances or effects or historical position of a work, but with a detailed consideration of the work itself as an independent entity. Notable critics in this mode were the southerners Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, whose textbooks Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943) did much to make the New Criticism the predominant method of teaching literature in American colleges, and even in high schools, for the next two or three decades. Other prominent writers of that time—in addition to Ransom, Brooks, and Warren—who are often identified as New Critics are Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, and William K. Wimsatt. A very influential English critic, E R. Leavis, in turning his attention from background, sources, and biography to the detailed analysis of "literary texts themselves," shared some of the concepts of the New Critics and their analytic focus on what he called "the words on the page." He differed from his American counterparts, however, in his emphasis on the great literary works as a concrete and life-affirming enactment of moral and cultural values; he stressed also the essential role in education of what he called "the Great Tradition" of English literature in advancing the values of culture and "civilization" against the antagonistic forces in modern life.

See F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936); Education and University (1943, 2d ed. 1948); The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry fames, Joseph Conrad (1948); also Anne Sampson, F. R. Leavis (1992).

The New Critics differ from one another in many ways, but the following points of view and procedures are common to many of them.

1. A poem, it is held, should be treated as such—in Eliot's words, "primarily as poetry and not another thing"—and should therefore be regarded as an independent and self-sufficient verbal object. The first law of criticism, John Crowe Ransom said, "is that it shall be objective, shall cite the nature of the object" and shall recognize "the autonomy of the work itself as existing for its own sake." (in objective crìticism.) New Critics warn the reader against critical practices which divert attention from the poem itself (in intentional fallacy and affective fallacy). In analyzing and evaluating a particular work, they eschew reference to the biography and temperament of the author, to the social conditions at the time of its production, or to its psychological and moral effects on the reader; they also tend to minimize recourse to the place of the work in the history of literary forms and subject matter. Because of this critical focus on the literary work in isolation from its attendant circumstances and effects, the New Criticism is often classified as a type of critical formalism. 
2. The principles of the New Criticism are basically verbal. That is, literature is conceived to be a special kind of language whose attributes are defined by systematic opposition to the language of science and of practical and logical discourse, and the explicative procedure is to analyze the meanings and interactions of words, figures of speech, and symbols. The emphasis is on the "organic unity," in a successful literary work, of overall structure and verbal meanings, and we are warned against separating the two by what Cleanth Brooks has called "the heresy of paraphrase."
3. The distinctive procedure of a New Critic is explication, or close reading: the detailed analysis of the complex interrelations and ambiguities (multiple meanings) of the verbal and figurative components within a work. "Explication de texte" (stressing all kinds of information relevant to the full understanding of a word or passage) has long been a formal procedure for teaching literature in French schools, but the kind of explicative analyses of verbal interactions characteristic of the New Criticism derives from such books as I. A. Richards' Practical Crìticism (1929) and William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930).
4. The distinction between literary genres, although acknowledged, does not play an essential role in the New Criticism. The essential components of any work of literature, whether lyric, narrative, or dramatic, are conceived to be words, images, and symbols rather than character, thought, and plot. These linguistic elements, whatever the genre, are often said to be organized around a central and humanly significant theme, and to manifest high literary value to the degree that they manifest "tension," "irony," and "paradox" in achieving a "reconciliation of diverse impulses" or an "equilibrium of opposed forces." The form of a work, whether or not it has characters and plot, is said to be primarily a "structure of meanings," which evolve into an integral and freestanding unity mainly through a play and counter play of "thematic imagery" and "symbolic action."

The basic orientation and modes of analysis in the New Criticism were adapted to the contextual criticism of Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger. Krieger defined contextualism as "the claim that the poem is a tight, compelling, finally closed context," which prevents "our escape to the world of reference and action beyond," and requires that we "judge the work's efficacy as an aesthetic object." (See Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry, 1956, and Theory of Criticism, 1976.) The revolutionary thrust of the mode had lost much of its force by the 1960s, when it gave way to various newer theories of criticism, but it has left a deep and enduring mark on the criticism and teaching of literature, in its primary emphasis on the individual work and in the variety and subtlety of the devices that it made available for analyzing its internal relations. Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chavira Hosek and Patricia Parker (1985), is a collection of structuralist, poststructuralist, and other essays which—often in express opposition to the New Criticism—exemplify the diverse newer modes of "close reading"; some of these essays emphasize that competing forces within the language of a lyric poem preclude the possibility of a unified meaning.

Central instances of the theory and practice of New Criticism are Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947), and W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (1954). The enterprises of New Criticism are privileged over alternative approaches to literature in René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (3d ed., 1964), which became a standard reference book in the graduate study of literature. Robert W. Stallman's Critiques and Essays in Criticism, 1920-1948 (1949) is a convenient collection of essays in this critical mode; the literary journal The Explicator (1942 ff.), devoted to close reading, is a characteristic product of its approach to literary texts, as are the items listed in Poetry Explication: A Checklist of Interpretation Since 1924 of British and American Poems and Present, ed. Joseph M. Kuntz (3d ed., 1980).

Russian Formalism

A type of literary theory and analysis which originated in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the second decade of this century. At first, opponents of the movement of Russian Formalism applied the term "formalism" derogatorily, because of its focus on the formal patterns and technical devices of literature to the exclusion of its subject matter and social values; later, however, it became a neutral designation. Among the leading representatives of the movement were Boris Eichenbaum, Victor Shklovsky, and Roman Jakobson. When this critical mode was suppressed by the Soviets in the early 1930s, the center of the formalist study of literature moved to Czechoslovakia, where it was continued especially by members of the Prague Linguistic Circle, which included Roman Jakobson (who had emigrated from Russia), Jan Mukarovsky, and René Wellek. Beginning in the 1940s both Jakobson and Wellek continued their influential work as professors at American universities.

Formalism views literature primarily as a specialized mode of language, and proposes a fundamental opposition between the literary (or poetical) use of language and the ordinary, "practical" use of language. It conceives that the central function of ordinary language is to communicate to auditors a message, or information, by references to the world existing outside of language. In contrast, it conceives literary language to be self-focused, in that its function is not to convey information by making extrinsic references, but to offer the reader a special mode of experience by drawing attention to its own "formal" features—that is, to the qualities and internal relations of the linguistic signs themselves. The linguistics of literature differs from the linguistics of practical discourse, because its laws are oriented toward producing the distinctive features that formalists call literariness. As Roman Jakobson wrote in 1921: "The object of study in literary science is not literature but 'literariness/ that is, what makes a given work a literary work." (See Linguistics in modern criticism)

The literariness of a work, as Jan Mukarovsky, a member of the Prague Circle, described it in the 1920s, consists "in the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance," that is, the foregrounding of "the act of expression, the act of speech itself." (To "foreground" is to bring something into the highest prominence, to make it dominant in perception.) By "backgrounding" the referential aspect and the logical connections in language, poetry makes the words themselves "palpable" as phonic signs. The primary aim of literature in thus foregrounding its linguistic medium, as Victor Shklovsky put it in an influential formulation, is to estrange or defamiliarize; that is, by disrupting the modes of ordinary linguistic discourse, literature "makes strange" the world of everyday perception and renews the reader's lost capacity for fresh sensation. (In the Biographia Literaria, 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had long before described the "prime merit" of a literary genius to be the representation of "familiar objects" so as to evoke "freshness of sensation"; but whereas the Romantic critic had stressed the author's ability to express a fresh mode of experiencing the world, the formalist stresses the function of purely literary devices to produce the effect of freshness in the reader's experience of a literary work.) The foregrounded properties, or "artistic devices," which estrange poetic language are often described as "deviations" from ordinary language.

Such deviations, which are analyzed most fully in the writings of Roman Jakobson, consist primarily in setting up and also violating patterns in the sound and syntax of poetic language—including patterns in speech sounds, grammatical constructions, rhythm, rhyme, and stanza forms—and also in setting up prominent recurrences of key words or images. Some of the most fruitful work of Jakobson and others, valid outside the formalist perspective, has been in the analysis of meter and of the repetitions of sounds in alliteration and rhyme. These features of poetry they regard not as supplementary adornments of the meaning, but as effecting a reorganization of language on the semantic as well as the phonic and syntactic levels. Formalists have also made influential contributions to the theory of prose fiction. With respect to this genre, the central formalist distinction is that between the "story" (the simple enumeration of a chronological sequence of events) and a plot. An author is said to transform the raw material of a story into a literary plot by the use of a variety of devices that violate sequence and deform and defamiliarize the story elements; the effect is to foreground the narrative medium and devices themselves, and in this way to disrupt what had been our standard responses to the subject matter. (See Narrative and Narratology)

American New Criticism, although it developed independently, is sometimes called "formalist" because, like European formalism, it stresses the analysis of the literary work as a self-sufficient verbal entity, constituted by internal relations and independent of reference either to the state of mind of the author or to the "external" world. It also, like European formalism, conceives poetry as a special mode of language whose distinctive features are defined in terms of their systematic opposition to practical or scientific language. Unlike the European formalists, however, the New Critics did not apply the science of linguistics to poetry, and their emphasis was not on a work as constituted by linguistic devices for achieving specifically literary effects, but on the complex interplay within a work of ironic, paradoxical, and metaphoric meanings around a humanly important "theme." The main influence of Russian and Czech formalism on American criticism has been on the development of stylistics, and of narratology. Roman Jakobson and Tzvetan Todorov have been influential in introducing formalist concepts and methods into French structuralism. Strong opposition to formalism, both in its European and American varieties, has been voiced by some Marxist critics (who view it as the product of a reactionary ideology), and more recently by proponents of reader-response criticism, speech-act theory, and new historicism; these last three types of criticism all reject the view that there is a sharp and definable division between ordinary language and literary language.

In the 1990s a number of critics have called for a return to a formalist mode of treating a work of literature primarily as literature, instead of with persistent reference to its stand, whether explicit or covert, on political, racial, or sexual issues. A notable instance is Frank Lentricchia's "Last Will and Testament of an Exliterary Critic" (Lingua Franca, Sept./Oct. 1996), renouncing his earlier writing and teachings "about literature as a political instrument," in favor of the view "that literature is pleasurable and important, as literature, and not as an illustration of something else." See also Harold Bloom's strong advocacy of reading literature not to confirm a political or social theory but for the love of literature, in The Western Canon (1994); the essays in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (1994); and Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (1997). (See also objective criticism under criticism.)

The standard treatment of the Russian movement is by Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (rev., 1981). See also R. L. Jackson and S. Rudy, eds., Russian Formalism: A Retrospective Glance (1985). René Wellek has described The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School (1969). Representative writings are collected in Lee T. Lemon and Marion I. Reese, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (1965); Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (1971); Garvin, ed., A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style and Peter Steiner, ed., The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929-1946 (1982). A comprehensive and influential formalist essay by Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," is included in his Language in Literature (1987). Samuel Levin's Linguistic Structures in Poetry (1962) represents an American application of formalist principles, and E. M. Thompson has written Russian Formalism and Anglo- American New Criticism: A Comparative Study (1971).