Editing New Criticism (section)

{{Short description|Formalist movement in literary theory}}
'''New Criticism''' was a [[Formalism (literature)|formalist]] movement in [[literary theory]] that dominated American [[literary criticism]] in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized [[close reading]], particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from [[John Crowe Ransom]]'s 1941 book ''The New Criticism''.

The works of [[University of Cambridge|Cambridge]] scholar [[I. A. Richards]], especially his  ''Practical Criticism'', ''The Principles of Literary Criticism'' and ''The Meaning of Meaning'', which offered what was claimed to be an empirical scientific approach, were important to the development of a New Critical methodology.<ref>Lynn, Steven. ''Texts and Contexts: Writing about Literature with Critical Theory''. Addison-Wesley, 2001.</ref> [[Cleanth Brooks]], [[John Crowe Ransom]], [[W. K. Wimsatt]], and [[Monroe Beardsley]] also made significant contributions to New Criticism. It was Wimsatt and Beardsley who introduced the ideas of [[Authorial intent|intentional fallacy]] and [[affective fallacy]]. Also very influential were the [[T. S. Eliot#Literary criticism|critical essays]] of [[T. S. Eliot]], such as "[[Tradition and the Individual Talent]]" and "[[Hamlet and His Problems]]", in which Eliot developed his notions of the "theory of impersonality" and "[[objective correlative]]" respectively. Eliot's evaluative judgments, such as his condemnation of [[John Milton]] and [[John Dryden]], his liking for the so-called [[metaphysical poets]], and his insistence that poetry must be impersonal, greatly influenced the formation of the New Critical canon.