9. THE BLACKWELL GUIDE TO LITERARY THEORY. Nature of li

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THE BLACKWELL GUIDE TO LITERARY THEORY

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Nature of literary theory
Literary theory is different from the term literary criticism. This is because literary
criticism happens to be the practical version of literary theory. From 1970s, the realm of literary
theories started to be embraced by different areas of study such as philosophy, politics,
psychoanalysis and history and various branches of literary theory started to appear such as
Marxism, feminism, structuralism, and cultural studies and so on. Various concepts, strategies
and methods have been involved in the making of different theories. Different ideological
opinions are also responsible in the diverse range of literary theories in the world. However there
is one similarity among all the theorists that is all of them try to generalize some idea and try to
conceive new concepts through the process of analysis and interpretation. Literary theories are
totally different from the scientific theories because literary theories are based on different
ideologies while the scientific theories are based on different assumptions.
For that reason, the society, cultural and the literary texts can be interpreted through an
understanding of relevant literary theories. For example, any literary text like the novel Hard
Times can be read from a Marxist approach using the theory of Marxism as the basis of
interpretation. Another difference between the literary theories and the literary theories is that the
one context or one situation can be interpreted by multiple theories simultaneously. In addition,
there can be more than one updated versions of one basic theory. However, all of them can be
accepted and followed upon. On the contrary, scientific theories replace one another and the
latest one only accepted. Finally, it can be said that scientific theories aim at achieving objective
results whereas literary theories tend to serve one mandatory object that is literature.
What is literature?
It is a very difficult task to define literary theory or the term ‘literary’. However, it is
more critical to give a certain explanation to the functions of term ‘literature’. This is because the
term can be explained in various ways. However, the value of the literary work has been
perceived by philosophers since a very long time. It can be said that most of the literary theories
are more or less inspired by the Aesthetic theory. For example, the theories like new criticism,
post modernism and theorists like Jean Lyotard have been highly influenced by the aesthetic
ideology.

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The perception towards literature being completely imaginative changed when it was
discovered that there are many parts in a literary work that includes real contents related to
politics, society and so on. Thus, one can say that litetarure is a fine art written a creative way
regardless of its contents. In addition, the difference between literature and other writings lies in
the fact that literature uses a kind of language that has several connotations. Another question
arises that is what the criteria of literariness are. Scholars have been surrounded by the question
regarding how to differentiate between different literary works on the basis of literariness. The
opinion can suffer from biases as the previously published literary works have been subjectively
reviewed by publishers of that time. Thus, their decisions cannot be taken as objective valuation
of the literary texts. In order to solve this issue, the theory of reader response has emerged that
has given the power to the readers to decide the value of any texts. Thus, any text can be
revalued by the readers and the scholars of any age as per their reinvented merits. On the other
hand, there can be no criteria of a literary theme because the range of literary works are vast and
are of diverse nature. So, it can be concluded that the reception of literature cannot be separated
from the sociological and other contexts in which we read them.
Practice of theory
Literary theory has a history of change on the basis of changing ways of interpreting
literary works. Despite the diversity in the range of literary theories, all of them are based on
certain general theories such as aesthetics, politics and so on. These general theories function
differently according to the demands of any specific context that gives rise to different theories.
There is a concept of discipline in the arena of literary theories that has two concerns including
the function and context of literary work and criteria of literary practice. It is true that literary
theories are ahistorical but it is also true that they have received their source from historical
contexts. These contexts may include intellectual traditions, received idea, social relations and so
on. Various reading practices have been created in order to perceive the value of the literary texts
although the ways of reading vary from the readers and their academic backgrounds.
The twentieth century literary theories have come up with latest approaches in order to
explore traditional literary works in a new light. These new interpretative modes have blurred the
distinctions between different disciplines because these approaches have opened a whole new
range of interdisciplinary studies. Theorists like Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva have