Foundation of Literary Theory and Criticism

Literary theory and criticism form the intellectual foundation of English literary studies because they provide the conceptual tools through which literature is interpreted, evaluated, and understood. Rather than treating literary texts as transparent containers of meaning, theory interrogates how meaning itself is produced. As Roger Webster argues, literary theory makes literature “problematic and heterogeneous” (Webster, 1996), compelling readers to question assumptions about language, truth, and representation. The origins of this critical tradition lie in the classical debate between Plato and Aristotle. In The Republic, Plato famously condemned poetry as an imitation removed from truth, arguing that poets appeal to emotion rather than reason and therefore threaten moral and intellectual order (Plato, 1992). His Allegory of the Cave functions as an extended metaphor demonstrating how art can become a shadow of reality rather than reality itself. Aristotle’s Poetics, however, offered a powerful rebuttal by redefining mimesis not as deception but as a creative representation of universal truths. His assertion that “poetry speaks more of universals, history of particulars” (Aristotle, 1967) elevated literature from mere imitation to a form of philosophical knowledge. Through concepts such as catharsis, hamartia, peripeteia, and anagnorisis, Aristotle established a critical vocabulary that continues to shape literary analysis today.

The Renaissance revived and transformed these classical debates through the works of Sir Philip Sidney and John Dryden. Responding to Puritan attacks on literature, Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy presents poetry as the highest form of knowledge because it combines philosophical wisdom with imaginative power. His famous claim that poetry “leadeth and draweth us to as high a perfection” (Sidney, 2004) reflects the Horatian principle of dulce et utile — the union of delight and instruction. Significantly, Sidney employs literary devices such as metaphor, classical allusion, and rhetorical amplification within his critical prose, illustrating that criticism itself often functions as literature. Dryden’s An Essay of Dramatic Poesy extends this tradition by reconciling classical rules with contemporary dramatic practice. Through a dramatic dialogue among competing voices, Dryden demonstrates that literary standards are historically contingent and must evolve with changing audiences. His definition of drama as “a just and lively image of human nature” (Dryden, 2004) reveals a commitment to both artistic representation and social relevance.

The nineteenth century witnessed a profound expansion of criticism’s cultural role through the work of Matthew Arnold. In “The Study of Poetry,” Arnold argues that poetry would increasingly replace religion as humanity’s primary source of moral and spiritual guidance. His famous declaration that “we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us” (Arnold, 1880) reflects his belief in literature’s ethical function. Arnold’s touchstone method, which evaluates literary works against passages from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, sought to establish standards of excellence rooted in “high seriousness.” Yet it was T. S. Eliot who revolutionized literary criticism in the twentieth century. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot rejects Romantic subjectivity, insisting that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion” (Eliot, 1919). Through his celebrated catalyst metaphor, Eliot portrays the poet as a medium through which emotions are transformed into artistic form. His theory of the objective correlative further demonstrates how literature generates emotion through images, symbols, and situations rather than direct expression, making form and structure central to literary value.

The emergence of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism fundamentally altered the foundations of literary criticism by shifting attention from authors and texts to language itself. Drawing on the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, Structuralists argued that meaning arises through systems of differences rather than through direct reference to reality. Literature, therefore, could only be understood within larger structures of language, genre, and culture. Post-Structuralists such as Jacques Derrida challenged even these assumptions, arguing that meaning is never stable but constantly deferred through language. Derrida’s theory of deconstruction reveals the instability of binary oppositions such as speech/writing, reason/emotion, and presence/absence. Similarly, Roland Barthes famously proclaimed the “Death of the Author,” insisting that meaning originates not in authorial intention but in the reader’s encounter with the text (Barthes, 1977). These developments transformed literary criticism from the evaluation of literature into a broader inquiry into language, ideology, and cultural power.

Across this intellectual tradition, several recurring themes unite otherwise divergent theories. The opposition between imitation and creation structures the debate between Plato’s suspicion of art and Sidney’s celebration of poetic invention. The tension between emotion and reason appears in Plato’s distrust of passion, Aristotle’s catharsis, Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and Eliot’s impersonality. Likewise, the conflict between tradition and innovation animates Dryden’s dialogue between Ancients and Moderns and culminates in Derrida’s challenge to inherited systems of meaning. Equally important is the question of literature’s moral and social purpose, from Plato’s desire to banish poets to Arnold’s belief that poetry can sustain civilization. Remarkably, the critics themselves employ literary devices in their theoretical works. Plato uses allegory and dialogue; Sidney employs metaphor and irony; Dryden constructs dramatic conversations; Arnold adopts prophetic rhetoric; and Eliot relies on scientific metaphor. Literary criticism therefore does not merely analyze literature, it participates in literary creativity itself.

Ultimately, the foundation of literary theory and criticism is best understood as an ongoing conversation rather than a collection of fixed doctrines. Each critic responds to the limitations of previous theories while opening new possibilities for interpretation. Plato questions poetry’s truthfulness; Aristotle defends its universality; Sidney celebrates its imaginative power; Dryden adapts criticism to changing contexts; Arnold elevates poetry’s cultural mission; Eliot emphasizes structure and tradition; and Structuralists and Post-Structuralists expose the instability of language itself. Together, these thinkers demonstrate that literary theory is not simply about literature but about the larger questions of meaning, knowledge, identity, and human experience. As Webster (1996) reminds us, theory should never be accepted as unquestionable truth but continually examined and challenged. This capacity for self-reflection remains the enduring legacy of literary theory and criticism, ensuring its continued relevance within English literary studies and beyond.

Literary theory and criticism constitute the intellectual foundation upon which the study of English literature is built. They provide the conceptual frameworks through which readers interpret texts, evaluate aesthetic value, and understand the relationship between literature and society. The distinction between theory and criticism is fundamental: literary theory seeks to establish general principles about the nature and function of literature, whereas literary criticism applies those principles to specific texts. As Roger Webster observes, literary theory renders literature “problematic and heterogeneous,” permanently unsettling the assumption that a text simply means what it says and demanding that the act of reading itself be subjected to rigorous intellectual scrutiny (Webster, 1996, p. 12). To study the foundations of literary theory and criticism is, therefore, to become conscious of the instruments through which we read and thereby to read both more carefully and more freely.

The origins of this tradition can be traced to the classical debate between Plato and Aristotle, whose conflicting views on poetry established the first major critical paradigm in Western literary thought. Their disagreement over mimesis, catharsis, and the moral status of art, initiated a dialectic that has persisted for two and a half millennia: through the Renaissance defenses of Sidney and Dryden, the Victorian moral vision of Arnold, the Modernist impersonality of T.S. Eliot, and the linguistic revolutions of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. The present article traces this tradition, integrating direct quotations from seminal texts, thematic analysis, and examination of the literary devices employed within foundational critical works, arguing that the foundation of literary theory is not a settled archive but a living intellectual conversation whose significance for English literary studies remains undiminished.

The Western critical tradition originates in a fundamental confrontation between two incompatible visions of what poetry is and what it does. Writing in the fourth century BCE, Plato mounted a sustained philosophical attack on poetry in The Republic, arguing that it constitutes a dangerous imitation of reality. Since the material world is itself only an imperfect copy of the ideal Forms, poetry which imitates the material world is twice removed from truth. Through the celebrated Allegory of the Cave, Plato demonstrates how art, like the shadows projected on a cave wall, deceives its audience into mistaking appearance for reality. More dangerously still, poetry appeals to the irrational passions rather than to reason, nourishing “the feelings and impairs the reason” (Plato, c. 380 BCE/1992, as cited in Habib, 2011, p. 15). In Ion, Plato extends this critique by arguing that poets are not skilled craftsmen but unconscious channels of divine madness, forming part of a magnetic chain from the Muse to the poet to the rhapsode to the audience. Because inspiration displaces rational knowledge entirely, poetry cannot claim epistemological or moral authority. Plato’s verdict is uncompromising: poets should be banished from the ideal Republic.

Aristotle Plato’s most distinguished student , answered this verdict with characteristic empiricism. Rather than condemning poetry on philosophical grounds, he examined the tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides and asked: what makes them effective? His answer, formulated in the Poetics (c. 335 BCE), provides the most durable analytical framework in the history of literary criticism. Aristotle defines tragedy as:

the imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation catharsis of these and similar emotions.

Aristotle, Poetics, c. 335 BCE (trans. Else, 1967)

Against Plato’s claim that mimesis is degrading third-grade imitation, Aristotle argues that the artist does not merely copy shifting appearances but represents Reality itself, giving form and meaning to universal truths. His famous observation that “poetry speaks more of universals, history of particulars” (Aristotle, c. 335 BCE/1967) positions poetry as more philosophical and therefore more valuable than history. And far from inflaming irrational passion, tragedy produces catharsis a structured, aesthetic purification of pity and fear that leaves the audience, as course materials note, “relieved or even exalted” (Components of Tragedy, n.d., as cited in course documents, 2022). The six elements of tragedy Plot (muthos), Character (ethos), Thought (dianoia), Diction (lexis), Song (melos), and Spectacle (opsis) remain so productive that they illuminate contemporary Pakistani drama (Pinjra) and documentary film (Salam, 2018) with equal precision (Saadi & Hassan, 2022; Saadi, 2025).

Table 1: Aristotle’s Six Elements of Tragedy

Element (Greek)

English Equivalent

Function in Tragedy

Applied Example

Plot (muthos)

Arrangement of incidents

Soul of tragedy; the primary principle

Abaan’s descent in Pinjra; Salam’s Nobel Prize as peripeteia

Character (ethos)

Moral disposition

Reveals choices; source of hamartia

Salam’s Ahmadi identity; Abaan’s artistic sensitivity

Thought (dianoia)

Intellectual content

Arguments and deliberations of characters

Salam’s defence of science as worship

Diction (lexis)

Verbal expression

Language as medium of imitation

Urdu poetic register in Pinjra’s songs

Song (melos)

Choral/musical element

Chief embellishment; choric commentary

Background score heightening emotional impact

Spectacle (opsis)

Visual/scenic effects

Least artistic element; stagecraft

Defaced gravestone in Salam documentary

Fifteen centuries after Aristotle, the Renaissance revived these debates with new urgency. In England, poetry faced fresh attacks from Puritan critics most notably Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse (1579) who condemned drama and verse as morally corrupting influences. Sir Philip Sidney’s response, The Defence of Poesy (c. 1580), is simultaneously a passionate counter-argument and a masterwork of Renaissance rhetoric. Sidney’s central claim is that poetry surpasses both history and philosophy as a vehicle for human improvement, because only poetry combines the vivid particularity of historical narrative with the abstract moral force of philosophical precept. He famously asserts that poetry “leadeth and draweth us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of” (Sidney, c. 1580/2004). His argument rests upon the Horatian principle of dulce et utile the classical conviction that literature must both delight and instruct , which he articulates with characteristic rhetorical amplification and classical allusion. Sidney’s self-deprecating irony in the Preface (“having slipped into the title of a poet, am provoked to say something unto you in the defense of that my unelected vocation”) is itself a literary device: by performing modesty, he disarms his opponents while securing his ethos as a serious interlocutor.

Poetry, therefore, is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word Mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture with this end, to teach and delight.

Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, c. 1580/2004

Sidney’s deployment of the phrase “speaking picture” is itself a figure of speech a metaphor that captures poetry’s dual capacity for concrete vividness and abstract instruction. His critical prose performs the very literary qualities it argues for: it is rhetorically constructed, imaginatively phrased, and aesthetically compelling. This recognition — that criticism employs literary devices is one of the most important meta-critical insights available to a student of English literature, and it connects Sidney’s Defence to later theoretical discussions about the boundary between literature and criticism (Habib, 2011).

John Dryden’s An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) advances practical criticism in a distinctly different but equally literary mode. Set as a dialogue on the Thames during a naval battle criticism embedded in the life of the nation the essay stages a debate between four voices: Crites (favouring the Ancients), Eugenius (favouring the Moderns), Lisideius (defending French neoclassical unities), and Neander (Dryden’s own voice, defending English drama). As Neander, Dryden champions Shakespeare’s tragicomedy for its subplots, mixed tones, and vitality, arguing that the strict Aristotelian unities of time and place are inappropriate to changed circumstances. Dryden synthesizes classical obligation with modern flexibility in his definition: “a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind” (Dryden, 1668/2004). This definition, balanced between classical precedent and contemporary responsiveness, characterizes Dryden as a New Classical critic: one who agrees with the Greek philosophical tradition but insists on adapting it for the present. Student lecture notes capture the central insight economically: “plays and playwrights changed because audience changed” (Student lecture notes, 2022). Dryden’s use of the dialogue form is itself significant: rather than silencing opposing positions, he allows them to articulate fully, producing a criticism that performs the very dialectical openness it argues for.

The nineteenth century deepened and transformed these foundations considerably. Matthew Arnold, writing in “The Study of Poetry” (1880), confronts a Victorian crisis of intellectual confidence: as religion falters under the pressure of scientific materialism and philosophy retreats into increasingly technical abstraction, Arnold argues that poetry must assume the moral and spiritual functions previously performed by faith. His tone is prophetic almost sermonic and his claim is sweeping in its cultural ambition:

More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

Arnold, The Study of Poetry, 1880

Arnold’s critical method is equally distinctive: the touchstone short passages from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton that serve as calibration standards against which other poetry can be measured for its “high seriousness” and genuine sincerity. His elevated diction, prophetic urgency, and rhetorical repetition are themselves literary devices: Arnold’s critical prose is, as he insists poetry must be, both serious and moving. This is not incidental but constitutive Arnold believes, with Eliot and with Plato, that criticism participates in the cultural life it analyzes. His emphasis on culture as “the best that is thought and known in the world” (Arnold, 1869, as cited in Webster, 1996) transforms literary criticism into an instrument of civilizational self-knowledge, positioning English literature as the medium through which a society understands and improves itself. This expansion of criticism’s scope beyond the merely aesthetic anticipates later sociological and cultural critics from F.R. Leavis’s moral evaluation to Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism , who would inherit and radicalize Arnold’s program.

T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) constitutes the pivotal text in the transition from Romantic subjectivity to Modernist objectivity, and it marks the point at which the critical tradition most decisively breaks with the idea that the poet’s personal emotion is the primary substance of literary value. Eliot’s argument operates on two connected claims. First, that tradition is not a static inheritance but a dynamic, living order: “the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (Eliot, 1919/2000). Every new work of genuine quality modifies the tradition it enters: “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (Eliot, 1919/2000). Second and more controversially , Eliot argues that great poetry requires impersonality, by which he means not the absence of feeling but the transformation of personal emotion into aesthetic structure:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919/2000

Eliot articulates the mechanism of this transformation through the chemical metaphor of the catalyst: the poet’s mind resembles a platinum filament that enables the combination of emotions and experiences into new aesthetic compounds while remaining itself unchanged. This metaphor itself a literary device deployed in critical prose gives rise to the concept of the objective correlative, defined in “Hamlet and His Problems” (1920) as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” (Eliot, 1920, as cited in course documents, 2022). In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), the image of “the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes” externalizes Prufrock’s hesitation and emotional paralysis through imagery, personification, and symbolic fragmentation — producing emotion through structure rather than direct statement, demonstrating the objective correlative in practice. Eliot thus aligns himself with Aristotle’s conviction that the form of the work its plot and structure , matters more than the personal emotions of its creator, and places himself in direct opposition to Wordsworth’s Romantic doctrine of “emotion recollected in tranquility” (Wordsworth, 1800/n.d.).

Eliot’s emphasis on textual structure over authorial emotion opened pathways that later theorists pursued far beyond his own intentions. Ferdinand de Saussure’s foundational argument — that language functions as a “system of signs” in which meaning is produced relationally rather than naturally (Habib, 2011) transformed literary criticism by redirecting attention from individual authors and texts to the linguistic structures governing meaning itself. Structuralism, emerging from Saussure’s linguistics through the anthropological work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the semiotic criticism of Roland Barthes, argued that individual texts can only be understood within the larger structures genres, codes, cultural conventions of which they are instances. Everything has a structure; nothing is understood in isolation; structural laws deal with coexistence rather than change (course documents, 2022).

Post-structuralism, associated above all with Jacques Derrida’s lecture “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), challenged structuralism’s assumption that these structures possess a stable center or ground. Derrida argued that Western thought is characterized by logocentrism — the assumption that a realm of truth exists prior to and independent of language and that this assumption is untenable. His method of deconstruction exposes the binary oppositions (speech/writing, presence/absence, reason/emotion) on which Western thought depends, and demonstrates that these oppositions are unstable: the subordinate term always already inhabits the dominant one, undermining the hierarchy from within. Roland Barthes extends this into literary criticism proper with “The Death of the Author” (1967), arguing that “it is language which speaks, not the author” (Barthes, 1977, p. 143): meaning is generated not by authorial intention but by language itself, and a text’s unity lies “not in its origin but in its destination” — the reader. Michel Foucault’s concept of the “author-function” (1969) further demonstrates that the author’s name serves an ideological purpose, controlling and delimiting the circulation of texts in ways that maintain knowledge and power in dominant sections of society (Webster, 1996).

These theoretical developments did not merely expand criticism’s intellectual range; they transformed its fundamental orientation. Where Plato and Aristotle debated whether poetry should be permitted or celebrated, and where Arnold and Eliot debated what standards should govern its evaluation, post-structuralist criticism asks whether the very categories author, text, meaning, literature that criticism has always taken for granted are stable, natural, and innocent. When applied to canonical works of English literature, this theoretical questioning produces readings of extraordinary richness: Shakespeare’s Hamlet becomes not merely a tragedy of revenge but a linguistic and philosophical exploration of the instability of identity, intention, and knowledge (Habib, 2011). F.R. Leavis’s insistence that “the business of the literary critic is to attain a vital completeness of response” (Leavis, 1937, as cited in course documents, 2022) appears, from this perspective, not as a final answer but as one more position within a tradition of contested claims about what reading fundamentally is.

Across this tradition, four themes recur with such persistence as to constitute the structural grammar of the field. The theme of imitation versus creation animates every debate from Plato’s third-grade imitation to Sidney’s golden world, from Aristotle’s universalizing mimesis to Wordsworth’s spontaneous overflow. The theme of emotion versus reason structures the opposition between Plato’s fear of passion and Aristotle’s cathartic redemption of it, between Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility” (Wordsworth, 1800/n.d.) and Eliot’s escape from emotion. The theme of tradition versus innovation appears in Dryden’s negotiation between Ancients and Moderns, Eliot’s dynamic reformulation of tradition, and the post-structuralist challenge to all inherited meanings. And the theme of literature’s moral and societal role the question of what poetry is for , runs from Plato’s banishment through Aristotle’s catharsis, Sidney’s dulce et utile, Arnold’s replacement of religion, to the Marxist and postcolonial critics who insist that literature reflects and reproduces ideological power (Habib, 2011).

Equally significant is the recognition that foundational critical texts employ the very literary devices they analyze. Plato’s attack on poetry is delivered through dramatic dialogue, allegory (the Cave), extended metaphor (the magnetic chain of divine inspiration), and Socratic irony his criticism performs the literary qualities he condemns, a profound internal contradiction that deconstruction would later expose. Sidney’s Defence is an oration, built on rhetorical amplification, metaphor (“poetry as nurse, as first light-giver”), and classical allusion. Dryden stages a theatrical debate; Arnold adopts a prophetic, sermonic voice; Eliot deploys a chemical metaphor and aphoristic compression. As Eliot’s own notes record, the poet functions as “a catalytic agent” (Student lecture notes, 2022) but this is itself a metaphor, not a technical description. Critical prose is not merely about literature; it participates in literature’s constitutive strategies of meaning-making. This insight anticipates Barthes’s argument that criticism is itself a form of writing and Derrida’s demonstration that the boundary between literary and philosophical text is permanently unstable (Barthes, 1977; Derrida, 1978).

Table 2: Major Critics, Key Concepts, and Critical Devices

Critic / Work

Era

Central Concept

Critical Device

Plato, The Republic & Ion

4th c. BCE

Mimesis as deception; divine madness; banish poets

Allegory; Socratic irony; magnetic chain metaphor

Aristotle, Poetics

350 BCE

Mimesis as universal truth; catharsis; six elements

Inductive classification; soul/body analogy

Sidney, Defence of Poesy

c. 1580

Poetry surpasses history and philosophy; dulce et utile

Rhetorical amplification; classical allusion; irony

Dryden, Essay of Dramatic Poesy

1668

Classical rules adapted for modern audiences

Dramatic dialogue; four competing voices; synthesis

Wordsworth, Preface to LB

1800

Spontaneous overflow; real language of men

Manifesto rhetoric; negative definition; rustic examples

Arnold, The Study of Poetry

1880

Poetry replaces religion; high seriousness

Prophetic tone; touchstone method; elevated diction

Eliot, Tradition & Ind. Talent

1919

Dynamic tradition; impersonality; objective correlative

Chemical metaphor; aphorism; objective correlative

Barthes / Derrida

1960s–

Death of author; deconstruction; no stable meaning

Binary opposition; textual instability; writing about writing

The foundation of literary theory and criticism is not a settled archive of resolved questions but a living, cumulative conversation in which each generation inherits a set of challenges from the previous one and reformulates them for new conditions. Plato raised the challenge of truth: can art be trusted as a guide to reality and virtue? Aristotle answered by redefining what truth means in an aesthetic context. Sidney answered by insisting on poetry’s capacity to create ideal images surpassing both history and philosophy. Dryden answered by demonstrating that critical standards must flex for changed audiences and contexts. Arnold answered the Victorian crisis by elevating poetry to replace faltering religion. Eliot answered Romantic excess by insisting on impersonality, tradition, and structural discipline. And the structuralist and post-structuralist traditions answered Eliot — and all their predecessors — by demonstrating that the very language in which these questions are posed is itself unstable, relational, and ideologically conditioned. This dialectical movement, from Plato’s Cave to Derrida’s trace, is the intellectual history of English literary studies.

The applied criticism carried out in this course reading Aristotle’s six elements into the Pakistani drama Pinjra and the documentary Salam (2018), analyzing the hamartia of Abdus Salam’s Ahmadi identity, the peripeteia of his Nobel Prize, and the catharsis of the audience’s moral clarification demonstrates precisely what this tradition exists to enable: the capacity to encounter a new text, in any medium and from any culture, and bring to bear on it a sophisticated analytical vocabulary that illuminates both what the work does and how it achieves its effects (Saadi & Hassan, 2022; Saadi, 2025). Theory supplies the framework; criticism brings it into contact with the irreducible particularity of individual texts and lives. Neither is sufficient alone. As Webster (1996) insists, literary theory can “explain some of the assumptions or values implicit in literature and literary criticism” but equally, “we should not let the ‘truths’ which emerge from theoretical texts stand unchallenged” (p. 12).

What makes this tradition indispensable, rather than merely historically interesting, is precisely this reflexive quality: the best literary criticism not only analyzes texts but interrogates the act of analysis itself. To study the foundations of literary theory and criticism is, as Sidney might have said, to participate in the “first light” that illuminates the relationship between language, meaning, and human life. It is, as Eliot would insist, to enter a tradition that is simultaneously complete and always in the process of being remade by every new mind that engages with it. And it is, as Roger Webster warns, never to mistake the frameworks we inherit for the final truth because the conversation, like literature itself, does not end (Webster, 1996; Habib, 2011).

References

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