What is Literature Theory, and the Best Examples?

James King Literature History
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Literature is writing that uses language to create works of art. It can take many forms, including novels, poetry, plays, and short stories. While literature theory studies the understanding and interpretation of it.

What is literature theory? Literature theory is the study of how we understand and interpret literature. It looks at the various ways in which literature can be understood and analysed. It is concerned with the ways in which literary works are created, consumed, and understood.

The most prominent fields of literature theory include

  • formalism
  • structuralism
  • poststructuralism
  • feminist theory, and
  • queer theory

Formalism

Old books on a shelf arranged formally

One of literature theory’s major schools is formalism, which emphasises the formal aspects of literature. This includes its structure, style, and language. Formalism focuses on the text itself, rather than on the author or the reader. It seeks to understand how the various elements of a literary work come together to create meaning.

As far as formalism is concerned, a text essentially exists within an authorial and cultural vacuum. In other words, it divorces the text from any biographical context about the author or the culture at large in which they were writing.

The only external context it considers is of literature itself, such as forms, genres, tropes, modes, and discourse.

Formalism in the 20th Century

At the start of the 20th century, formalism sprang up as a rejection of Romanticism, a literary movement that dominated much of the previous century. Formalism was a reaction against the Industrial Revolution and its new technologies and mechanisations.

As exciting as many of these advances were, many people were frightened of the rapidly changing world they occupied. They found much of it dehumanising and soulless. In response, they glorified the past as a Golden Age that produced exceptional literature and great art.

At the time literature theory focused on individuals, nature, and spirituality.

The Scientific Approach

Formalists, however, felt that people were trapped in the past. They decided that criticism had become too focused on requiring an understanding of the author’s individual circumstances. To them, what was important was how the text sat with preceding texts that had influenced it. So, they applied what could best be called a scientific or objective method to the study of literature.

Russian Formalism

It surprised them to find Formalism cropped up in many cultures. One of the major ones being Russian Formalism, which was spearheaded by two organisations.

They were the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded by Roman Jakobson in 1914, and the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, founded by Boris Eichenbaum, Yury Tynyanov, and Viktor Shklovsky. They focused mainly on linguistics.

Because literary language is distinct from everyday speech, they felt it had to be analysed alone, outside of cultural context. Furthermore, because literature has its own distinct history of evolution, they believed it should be studied outside of societal history.

They also found literary form indistinguishable from its content. To fully understand a work of literature, you had to understand its style in the context of how the style developed across literature.

New Criticism and Resistance to Formalism

At the same time, the United States was dominated by New Criticism. This was a similar movement that treated literature as a self-contained object that was essentially only beholden to itself.

It centred on close reading, in which a text was essentially analysed word by word, but only on its own terms, with no outer context.

Pushback against formalism took root in the mid-20th century when it became clear to some that cultural and biographical contexts are key to fully understanding a work. People are products of their societies, and so is the literature they produce.

Structuralism

picture of an open book with reading glasses, depicting structure

Another important school of literature theory is structuralism, which is concerned with the underlying structures and patterns that can be found in literary works.

Structuralists believed that literature is not just a collection of words. Rather, it is a system of signs and symbols that can be decoded to reveal hidden meanings and messages. Structuralism was based on theories put forth by the Swiss linguist and philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure.

Outside literary theory, structuralists posited that all human behaviour was determined by various structures: social, cultural, and psychological. Literary critics and philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes then applied that to literature.

The Beginning Theory – Nothing is Isolated

According to Peter Barry in his book The Beginning Theory, structuralism is the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation—they have to be seen in the context of larger structures they are part of. Furthermore, these structures themselves don’t stem from nothing, but are made up of our perception of the world.

Everything is inextricable. What we believe is real informs societal structures, and societal structures inform what we believe.

Structuralism has the idea of taking a literary work in the context of other works in common with formalism. Unlike formalism, however, what is paramount is understanding the structures that inform everything. And understanding the shared language of literature can help us understand the societal structures they sprang from better.

Structuralist semiotics explain that an experienced reader picks up on them better than a non-experienced one. By studying many literary works, one can uncover a specific grammar of literature, thus called by Bulgarian linguist Tzvetan Todorov.

His idea of what is literature theory was that there’s essentially a secret language structurally linking them together. Avid readers understand what they’re reading due to intrinsically picking up on these structures. Reading widely helps teach a person this language.  

Poststructuralism

Picture of an old open book with a decaying rose on it

Another important area of literature theory is poststructuralism, which is an extension of structuralism. Poststructuralists believe that language is not a neutral medium, but that it is shaped by power dynamics and social and cultural influences.

This means that the meaning of a literary work is not fixed but is constantly shifting and changing according to the context in which it is read.

Poststructuralism is essentially a full rejection of structuralism. Post, meaning they had moved on and were beyond it. Structuralism insists on the existence of set structures underlying everything. While poststructuralism considers the meaning itself unstable.

Within structuralism, language is a self-contained system that can be understood by gleaning meaning from other texts. Poststructuralism, however, understands that there will always be a break between signifier and signified.

Interpreting Literature is Subjective

People’s perception of a word is influenced by their own life experiences, not just by other literature they’ve read. What becomes most important is the meaning each individual reader derives from a work rather than the author’s intent.

After all, it’s impossible to know with any surety what an author meant. We can’t gaze into their minds. All we can do is bring our own lives and experiences to how we interpret a piece of literature. Unlike non-fiction, the interpretation of fiction is entirely subjective.

Fiction is an exploration of possibilities, and when writing a novel, the author is exploring. Any story is full of what ifs. When a novel is published, the author must have settled on his version of what happened. But it is only his version, and his creativity will determine whether the reader believes him or sees it differently.

Much of poststructuralism came from linguists and philosophers who started out as structuralists. Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, mentioned above as structuralists eventually moved to poststructuralism. Another of the most famous poststructuralists who straddled the line between both is Michel Foucault.

Feminist Literature Theory

woman with glasses reading a book

An important school of what is literature theory is feminist theory, which focuses on the ways in which literature reflects and reinforces gender roles and stereotypes. It extended from feminism, a political movement that critiqued the male-dominated patriarchal structures that dominated society.

One of the major early events that set feminism in motion was Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792.

Feminist literature theory applies this to interrogating how gender works within literary texts. It does this in multiple ways, one of the key ones being to examine how female characters are presented.

Feminist literature theorists contend that, throughout history, female characters have been written almost exclusively from a male perspective. Thus, they’ve been treated as objects rather than subjects, even when they are ostensibly major characters. Often authors make little attempt to truly delve into their innermost lives.

But when it happens, it often presents the woman as centering the men in her life. Either that or behaving in a stereotypically feminine fashion as defined by men.

Re-evaluating the Classical Literary Canon

Feminist literature theory also re-evaluates the classical literary canon, since nearly all the so-called great major works were written by men. In conjunction, they attempt to uncover lost works by women that didn’t get attention when they were written.

Feminist literary critics apply many methods in pursuit of their goals. They look at how women are described in literature—what kind of words are used and whether they’re gendered. Male authors aren’t the only ones who might perpetuate this, but they’re considered more likely to.

Furthermore, the feminists look at both themselves and others as readers, and how they respond to a text. They examine what ways their own identities as women inform how they read and what and who they identify with.

When it comes to literature theory in non-fiction, women examine how female subjects are treated by historians and biographers. They want to see if their own assumptions about various historical women are due to the implicit biases of the men who wrote about them.

They also look at language and interrogate what is biased against women. A ubiquitous example being the use of masculine pronouns to describe the universal. They examine the general differences between how men vs. women generally write. For example, men tend to speak more directly whereas the language women use tends to be more reflexive.

Another key manner in which they interrogate literature is to question how a text could have resisted the patriarchy. This isn’t only an interesting thought experiment but an examination of an author’s societal biases. What does the author take for granted that they perpetuate in their text which possibly could have been radically reimagined? And in so doing, how could that text have gone on to inspire readers to reevaluate their own place in the world?

Queer Theory

person made of wood lying on the floor reading a book

Last, we come to queer theory, which looks at the representation of LGBTQ+ characters and experiences in literature. In some ways, it can be seen as an outgrowth of feminist theory.

This example of what is literature theory similarly interrogates our world and examines how the dominant narrative has been written by heterosexual men. Although queer theory also expands this to include all cisgendered heterosexual people, heteronormativity being rooted in patriarchy is key.

As with feminist theory, one of the things queer theory does is to look at texts and find the ways that LGBTQ+ characters are being depicted, if at all. Queer theory takes this even further.

Whereas most texts include women, the same isn’t true for queer characters. In earlier points of history, many authors had to hide their queer identities for safety. So, the Queer theorists re-examine narratives to see what queerness might be submerged in the subtexts.

Queer theory has much in common with the other literary theories that have treated literature as inextricable from its society. As with feminism, there’s a focus on how literature can help change the world.

Jay Stewart writes in his essay Academic Theory that queer theory celebrates transgression as a visible difference from norms. These norms are exposed as not natural or inevitabe.

Queer literature helps bring to light how society creates unnatural constructs, such as gender norms, that it treats as natural. It works in tangent with wider queer theory to create an enlightened world free of those constraints.

Final Thoughts

Overall literature is a form of writing that uses language to create works of art. And literature theory is the study of how we understand and interpret literature. It is concerned with the way literary works are created, consumed, and understood by different audiences.

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