New Criticism Essay

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KEY CONCEPTS OF NEW CRITICISM New Criticism was a movement in literary theory and was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the early twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. New criticism has now been established for quite a generation and so it may be assumed that a general acquaintance with its theoretical foundations and contentions, with its aims and objects and technique and method must be common among students of literature. The New critics themselves have established their position gradually over a number of years by developing their thesis piecemeal as and when they met with objections and provocations for grasping their view point, a number of articles in various periodicals and chapters in various books have to be read. New criticism emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self contained, self referential aesthetic object. At their best, the new critics reading were brilliant, articulately argued and broad in scope, but sometimes they were idiosyncratic and moralistic. New critics focused on the text of a work of literature and tried to exclude the reader's response, the author’s intention, historical and cultural contexts and moralistic bias from their analysis. New criticism proposed that a work of literary art should be regarded as autonomous and so should not be judged by reference to considerations beyond itself. Major figures of New Criticism include I.A.Richards, T.S.Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, F.R.Leavis, W.K.Wimsatt, R.P.Blackmur and Ivor Winters. New critics often performed a "close reading" of the text and believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected and should not be analyzed separately. Before the New Criticism became dominant, English professors in America focused
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