12 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
C. S. Lewis was a British novelist and theologian best known for 'The Chronicles of Narnia' and 'Mere Christianity', who was also a noted scholar of medieval English literature at Oxford.
Roland Barthes's 1967 manifesto declaring that the author's biography and intentions are irrelevant to textual interpretation — meaning is produced by the reader in the act of reading, not by the author in the act of writing.
Palestinian-American literary critic who founded postcolonial studies with Orientalism — showing how Western knowledge of 'the Orient' was a form of power — and who was the most prominent Palestinian intellectual in the West.
The literary and cultural historical method that reads literary texts not as autonomous aesthetic objects but as participants in the power relations and cultural practices of their historical moment.
Canadian literary critic who developed a systematic archetypal criticism in Anatomy of Criticism, arguing that all literature derives from a small set of archetypal narrative patterns ultimately rooted in seasonal myth.
American literary scholar who founded New Historicism and wrote Will in the World (Shakespeare biography) and Hamlet in Purgatory — which argues that Hamlet's ghost is Shakespeare's working through of the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory that Protestant England abolished.
T. S. Eliot was an Anglo-American poet and critic whose 'The Waste Land' (1922) and 'Four Quartets' (1943) are among the foundational texts of literary modernism.
Kaufmann's account of the relationship between Greek tragedy and philosophy — arguing against Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy while drawing on it, and presenting an original theory of tragedy.
British philosopher and author (1898-1997), a central figure in the Inklings alongside C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Developed an original philosophy of consciousness evolution through the study of language history, drawing on Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy. Lewis called him his wisest and best friend.
Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic — author of History and Class Consciousness (1923), the foundational text of Western Marxism, and one of the most significant Marxist thinkers outside of Marx himself.
American literary critic and one of the founders of queer theory — whose Epistemology of the Closet (1990) established that the closet (the open secret of homosexuality) is a structuring principle of modern Western culture.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's foundational queer theory text — arguing that the homo/heterosexual distinction is a structuring principle of modern Western culture and that the closet (knowledge-ignorance about sexuality) shapes cultural epistemology broadly.