New Criticism: Shaping Modern Literary Analysis

The Rise of New Criticism

The New Critical method was rapidly adopted, particularly in the North, due to its inexpensive and easily transferable characteristics. Prominent scholars in the North included Austin Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks. Brooks, in particular, emerged as the most influential New Critic.

Transforming Literary Study

Traditionally, English literature was taught as the History of English Literature, an extrinsic method. New Critics sought to transform these departments into centers of Literary Criticism. They achieved this through three key methods that fundamentally changed the organization of the teaching profession:

• Staffing University Departments

  Gradually, New Critics began to occupy chairs of literature previously held by historians. They exerted control over the training of new teachers, creating a chain reaction effect by exclusively hiring other New Critics.

• Founding Influential Journals

  They established highly influential journals, read primarily by cultivated individuals, yet profoundly impactful in their own right. Notable examples include The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, and Hound & Horn.

• Publishing Core Textbooks

  They authored highly influential textbooks that were read and studied by millions worldwide. These included An Approach to Literature (1936), Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), and Understanding Drama (1945). The order of publication reflected the importance they assigned to literary genres: poetry first, followed by fiction (often studied through short stories or fragments, never long works), and then drama, which they considered partially literary. These texts aimed to foster a coherent understanding of English Literature.

Shared Principles of Criticism

Common Features: American New Criticism & English Practical Criticism

• Text-Centered Approach

  Both were text-centered schools of criticism, focusing absolutely on the words on the page. They believed that literature was precisely what one read.

• Selective Choice of Texts

  They exhibited a peculiar choice of study texts, predominantly authored by white, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, middle-class individuals. Very few Black authors or women were included, which led them to believe that only such authors could produce true literature. For them, literature was equated with qualities like brevity, concentration, condensation, and intensity. New Critics considered a text more literary when it was shorter, a preference stemming from their method of study: close reading.

• The Poem as a Tangible Object

  For the New Critics, the poem possessed a special object-like quality, a physical dimension—something that exists and can be touched. Cleanth Brooks, in The Well-Wrought Urn, referred to the poem with this metaphor, and W.K. Wimsatt, in The Verbal Icon, similarly referred to the poem as an artistic object.