Chapter 19 - Critical and Literary Theory

Summary

British literary criticism and theory have always been primarily focused on meaning and on value, that is, on the interpretation and evaluation of literary texts. Equally characteristic are their strong sense of having a social mission and their interest in the social value of texts. On the continent, criticism and theory developed in a wholly different, ‘scientific’ direction. The Russian Formalists tried to define the ‘literariness’ of literary texts, the Prague Linguistic Circle introduced the notion of ‘structure’, phenomenologists were concerned with the ontological status of the literary work, and the structuralists of the 1960s and after analysed that narrative and its presentation, with interpretation and evaluation always playing a marginal role. The advent of poststructuralism – whose reception in the UK was markedly different from that in the United States – brought the two traditions substantially closer to each other, but there has not been a real convergence.