New Criticism

New Criticism refers to a primarily in the U.S., to a lesser extent -based in England literary critical and theoretical direction. It developed in the 1920s and was in the U.S. until the 1970s, the dominant type of literary analysis. Was named the New Criticism after the anthology The New Critics, published in 1941 by John Crowe Ransom.

The New Criticism was directed against the prevailing since the 19th century literary criticism, often limited only to historical, philological and biographical details of the seal or the poet and took effect, inter alia, to Roland Barthes in 1968 proclaimed death of the author ( comparative also the so-called close reading ).

The New Critics used to speak against the assumption that each poem a " prose meaning " or even a moral containing that had to be rescued from the lyric. They knocked instead on the importance of language as a symbolic means of knowledge and trying to figure out " what says the poem as a poem " ( Cleanth Brooks). Their analysis thus examined mainly formal aspects of the poem and is so the later French structuralism coinage used by the New Criticism was associated since the 1950s.

Main proponents of New Criticism in the United States were John Crowe Ransom and many of his students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville after the First World War, including Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. Among the most important mouthpieces included the literary magazine The Kenyon Review (ISSN 0163 - 075x ).

One of the main representatives of the New Criticism in Britain included William Empson and IA Richards.

Critics complained especially since the 1980s, that the artwork of the New Critics would completely torn from its development context. The New Historicism is therefore to be understood as a reaction to the New Criticism and poststructuralism of the 1960s and 1970s.