literary theory and creative writing

The Rise of Creative Writing

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• Andrew Cowan  

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In The Elephants Teach , his analysis of the complex history of Creative Writing as a university subject in the United States, D. G. Myers remarks that Creative Writing achieved its ‘full growth’ as a discipline in the late 1960s and early 1970s ‘when the purpose of its graduate programs (to produce serious writers) was uncoupled from the purpose of its undergraduate courses (to examine writing seriously from within)’ (2006, p. 149). Myers’s argument (in context) is persuasive, though the binary starkness of his proposition inevitably fails to anticipate the increasingly vocational orientation of many undergraduate programmes (with their emphasis on skills appropriate to employment in the ‘creative industries’) and the research orientation of many PhD programmes (with their aim of producing serious academics).

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Cowan, A. (2016). The Rise of Creative Writing. In: Hewings, A., Prescott, L., Seargeant, P. (eds) Futures for English Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-43180-6_4

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Literary Theory Reference Works

Throughout your studies of literature, you will encounter a wide range of literary theories and critical frameworks. These are often employed by scholars to assist with the interpretation of a text or an analysis of the text’s significance.

Some essay questions will require you to adopt a particular framework, while others will allow you to choose your own. When it comes to deciding which literary theories or critical frameworks to draw on, it is usually best to respond to what you see as the text’s key themes or most interesting  aspects. Whichever approach you choose, you should ensure that your analysis is supported by the text itself.

Below you’ll find a few of the more common critical frameworks used in literary studies today. Feel free to explore these and do further reading on those of interest.

Structuralism and semiotics

Narratology and rhetoric , reception theory and reader-response criticism , post-structuralism , deconstruction , marxism and critical theory , psychoanalysis , postcolonialism , feminism .

• Gender studies and queer history 

New historicism 

• Ecocriticism
• Aesthetics 

Developing out of Russian Formalism and New Criticism in the 1960s, structuralism tends to strive toward objective and scientific approaches to texts and their interpretation. It sees the meanings of texts as rooted in their form and structure, or how the different elements of the text relate to one another.

Semiotics, the study of signs and how they create meaning, often went hand-in-hand with structuralism, as it focused on the structures of language.

An example of structuralism and semiotics can be found in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, whose studies of mythical stories emphasised their common structures (key plot points, narrative developments, and so on).

Further reading:

• Claude Lévi-Strauss,  "The Structural Study of Myth"  (1955)
• Northrop Frye,  Anatomy of Criticism  (1957)
• Roland Barthes,  Mythologies   (1957) and   Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives   (1966)
• Umberto Eco,  The Role of the Reader  (1979)

Narratology grew out of structuralism and can be seen as the application of the principles and objectivity of structuralism, to narratives.

Thus, narratological studies tend to focus on the form, structure and composition of narratives, identifying how texts deploy different narrative techniques, styles and devices. For example,

Today, narratology generally attempts to avoid structuralism’s more reductive tendencies, incorporating insights from reception theory and post-structuralist theory.

• Wayne C. Booth’s  The Rhetoric of Fiction  (1961)
• Gérard Genette’s  Narrative Discourse  (1972)
• James Phelan’s   Narrative as Rhetoric  (1996)

Reader-response criticism focuses on how readers experience or encounter literary texts, being much less interested in the circumstances of a text’s authorship than its impact on readers. Reception theory, similarly, focuses on the unique responses of individual readers to literary texts.

Proponents of reception theory tend to see readers, not authors, as the creators of meaning. When examining texts, they might choose to consider how readers have responded to, or interpreted, the text in the past, or study how the text itself attempts to elicit a particular response from the reader.

• Wolfgang Iser's  The Act of Reading   (1978)
• Stanley Fish’s   Is There a Text in This Class?   (1980)
• Hans Robert Jauss’s  Toward an Aesthetic of Reception   (1982)
• Elizabeth Freund’s  The Return of the Reader   (1987)

In the mid-1960s, post-structuralism emerged as a critique of structuralism and semiotics. These existing frameworks were seen to be overly restrictive, while not accurately reflecting the complexity of language and meaning.

Post-structuralists tend to emphasise the instability of language and see meaning as highly subjective (in no way fixed or objective). Early post-structuralists focused on critiquing traditional notions of authorship and, in turn, looking at the many possibilities for interpretation and meaning available to readers.

• Roland Barthes’s  "The Death of the Author"  (1967) and  S/Z  (1970)
• Julia Kristeva’s  The Kristeva Reader   (ed. Toril Moi) (1986)
• Gilles Deleuze’s  Difference and Repetition  (1968)
• Michel Foucault’s  “What Is an Author?”  (1969)

Deconstruction, a key component of the post-structuralist movement, focuses on dismantling commonly accepted social, cultural and political concepts.

A common deconstructionist approach involves critiquing accepted binary oppositions (such as male/female, black/white) and highlighting their underlying ideologies, thereby undermining them as concepts.

A deconstructionist approach to a novel, for example, might consider how the text attempts to maintain a binary opposition between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, while reflecting on how this distinction is ideologically motivated and ultimately undermined in the novel itself.

• Jacques Derrida’s  “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences"  (1966),  Of Grammatology  (1967) and  Acts of Literature  (1992)
• Martin McQuillan (ed.),   Deconstruction: A Reader   (2000)
• Judith Butler,  Bodies that Matter   (1993)
• Simon Critchley,  The Ethics of Deconstruction  (3rd ed., 2014)
• Derek Attridge,  Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction's Traces  (2010)

Critical theory focuses on the cultural, historical and ideological aspects of texts. It typically involves Marxist or post-Marxist critiques of social, political and economic structures. In this sense, critical theory reflects a kind of  historical materialism , being fundamentally concerned with the material circumstances of individuals at different points in history.

When it comes to reading texts, a Marxist approach might analyse the representation of characters from different social classes, the power dynamics between these characters, or how characters experience economic inequality.

• Karl Marx,  Capital  (1867)
• Max Horkheimer,  “Traditional and Critical Theory”  (1937)
• Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács,  Aesthetics and Politics  (2011)
• Terry Eagleton,  Marxism and Literary Criticism  (1976)
• Fredric Jameson,  Marxism and Form   (1971)
• Andrew Milner and Jeff Browitt,  Contemporary Cultural Theory  (3rd ed., 2002)
• Fred Rush (ed.),  Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory   (2004)

Pioneered by Sigmund Freud in the late nineteenth century, psychoanalysis focuses on uncovering and analysing people’s ‘unconscious’ thoughts. It works off the premise that it’s human nature to repress certain parts of ourselves, and thus all literary texts can be read in terms of the manifestations of these ‘unconscious’ parts.

In particular, the psychoanalysis of literature looks at either the author of work, the text’s contents and formal construction, the reader of the text, or a combination of these (ref: Eagleton).

With Freudian analysis, these meanings often relate to unconscious desire or anxiety over pleasure and gratification. Studies often explore concepts such as the Oedipus complex, and the id, ego and superego.

• Sigmund Freud,  The Interpretation of Dreams , (1899)
• Carl Jung,  Psychology of the Unconscious  (1912)
• Jacques Lacan,  The Four Fundamental Concepts  (1973)
• Harold Bloom,  Anxiety of Influence  (1973)
• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar "The Anxiety of Authorship" in  The Madwoman in the Attic   (1979)
• Matthew Sharpe,  Understanding Psychoanalysis  (2008)
• Laura Marcus and Ankhi Mukherjee,  A concise companion to psychoanalysis, literature, and culture   (2014)
• Maud Ellmann,  Psychoanalytic literary criticism   (1994)

Postcolonial criticism explores authors or texts representing the legacy of colonisation, which includes the exploitation and repression of colonised cultures by imperial powers.  Postcolonial literary theory focuses on exposing and critiquing existing power structures in colonised cultures, with an emphasis on cultural literatures.

Key concepts include the politics of knowledge concerning cultural and national identity, the Orient (East) and the Occident (West), and the Other, or subaltern.

• Edward Said,  Orientalism  (1978)
• Gayatri Spivak,  In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics  (1987)
• Homi Bhabha,  The Location of Culture  ( 1994)
• Frantz Fanon,  The Wretched of the Earth  (1961)
• Neil Lazarus,  The Cambridge companion to postcolonial literary studies  (2004)
• Pramod K. Nayar,   Postcolonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed   (2010)

Feminist theory is primarily concerned with exposing and examining the prevailing patriarchal structures in society, and advocating political, economic and social equality for women.

There are lots of branches of feminism, and as approaches have changed over time some scholars find it helpful to separate out theories into first wave (late 1700s to early 1900s), second wave (early 1960s to late 1970s) and third wave (early 1990s to present) feminism. The feminist movement remains very diverse and encompases a wide range of perspectives on how to improve equality for women.

Feminist literary theory examines many aspects of literature, including the exclusion of women from the traditional literary canon, problems of female authorship, the performativity of gender in texts, and the female experience in and of literature.

• Judith Butler,  Gender Trouble  (1990)
• Simone de Beauvoir,  The Second Sex  (1972)
• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,  The Madwoman in the Attic  (1979)
• bell hooks,  Feminist Theory, from Margin to Center   (1984), and  Feminism is for Everybody   (2000)
• Jessica Bomarito & Jeffrey W Hunter (eds.),  Feminism in Literature : a Gale critical companion  (Jeffrey W. Hunter ; Jessica Bomarito)
• Ellen Rooney (ed.),  The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory  (2006)

Gender studies and queer theory 

Growing out of post-structuralist feminist theories in the 1970s, gender studies and queer theory often reject binary classifications such as female and male, and use the language of deconstruction to explore new implications and meanings of texts.

In literary studies, this approach often includes examinations of the politics and poetics of gender and queer representations in texts, and how these reflect (or challenge) social attitudes around gender and sexuality.

• Hélène Cixous,  "The Laugh of the Medusa"  (1976)
• Michel Foucault,  The History of Sexuality , (1980)
• Judith Butler,  "Imitation and Gender Insubordination"  (1991)
• Lee Edelman,  "Homographesis"  (1989)

Developed in the 1980s, new historicism views texts as products of specific cultural and political periods. Thus, new historicism focuses on analysing texts, authors and critics in their historical contexts, which often includes examining power structures and ideologies.

New historicism is a transdisciplinary critique, combining post-structuralist concepts and the study of history. Such studies often consider the circumstances of texts’ production and subjective interpretations of history.

• Michel Foucault,  Discipline and Punish   (1975), and  The History of Sexuality  (1976)
• Stephen Greenblatt,  Renaissance Self-Fashioning  (1980)   and   Towards a Poetics of Culture  (1987)
• Aram H. Veeser,   The New Historicism   (1989)
• Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt,  Practicing New Historicism   (2000)

Ecocriticism 

Ecocriticism focusses on the role of nature in literature, often involving an interrogation of ecological values in texts. Ecocriticism is a transdisciplinary approach that is often informed by related scientific fields, such as ecology and the environmental sciences.

Ecocriticism often examines the notion of “place” in literature, while challenging ideas of anthropocentrism (human-centeredness). Ecocritical studies of literature may also focus on representations of climate change, natural disaster, and animal life.

• Raymond Williams,   The Country and The City  (1975)
• Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (eds.)  The Ecocriticism Reader  (1996)
• Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby (eds.)  Ecocritical Theory  (2011)
• Kate Rigby’s  Dancing with Disaster   (2015)

Broadly, aesthetics is a branch of philosophy concerned with art and the notion of the beautiful. Such studies date back to Plato and Aristotle, who reflected on the nature of art and its many forms, and were further developed by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant.

Aesthetic studies of literature tend to focus on philosophical questions of the nature of literary art and the enjoyment of literature, while asking what constitutes a “good” or “beautiful” text.

Traditional aesthetics often concerns itself with the notion of “art for art’s sake”, while recent works might connect the field with broader socio-political contexts. Such studies often seek

a framework through which to make judgements concerning the value of different kinds of literature for specific social or political ends.

• Theodor W. Adorno,  Aesthetic Theory   (1970)
• David Davies,  Aesthetics and Literature   (2007)
• Jeffrey R. Di Leo (ed.),  Criticism after Critique: Aesthetics, Literature, and the Political  (2014)
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2014, The Handbook of Creative Writing

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Literary Theory

Why do we use literary theory to analyze literature.

In addition to the vocabulary of literary and figurative devices , literary theory provides readers with an additional conceptual vocabulary to analyze and interpret literary works. Literary theory facilitates the use of knowledge external to the text that provides a framework that helps to focus intellectual questions and analysis.

As noted by Lois Tyson in Critical Theory Today , critical literary theory provides tools for analysis that “not only can show us our world and ourselves through new and valuable lenses but also can strengthen our ability to think logically, creatively, and with a good deal of insight” (3).

Literary Theories Defined

For an overview of literary theories and their definitions, review the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Literary Theory page .

Literary Theorists and Contributions

• Mikhail Bakhtin: Russian formalism–chronotopes, dialogism, heteroglossia, polyphony
• Jacques Lacan: psychoanalytic criticism–post-Freudian, the mirror stage, the symbolic
• Louis Althusser: Marxist criticism–ideology and ideological state apparatuses, interpellation
• Cleanth Brooks: New criticism–irony, paradox
• Ferdinand de Saussure: Semiotics–sign=signifier and signified
• Roland Barthes: Structuralist criticism–readerly and writerly, sign systems
• Jacques Derrida: Deconstructive criticism–deconstruction, différance , the trace
• Michel Foucault: New historicist–discourse and power/knowledge
• Stephen Greenblatt: Cultural criticism–ethical/political orientation, freedom/lack of thought or moment, popular culture, oppressed groups, models of practice and social structures, social understandings,
• Elaine Showalter: Feminist criticism–gynocriticism
• Judith Butler: Lesbian, gay, and queer criticism–gender construction, gender performativity
• Edward Said: Post-Colonial criticism–orientialism, other/othering
• Julia Kristeva: Poststructuralist feminist criticism–abject, abjectification
• bell hooks: Black feminist criticism–intersectionality of racism and gender
• Gloria Anzaldúa: Chicana feminism/queer theory–borderlands identity, mestizaje

How Do We Apply Literary Theories

There are numerous theories that allow for analysis of literary works, and writers often apply more than one.

For example, a writer might:

• Use an African American / Critical Race Theoretical lens to analyze material determinism in the short story “The Lesson” also contextualizes it through the Marxist lens of historicism.
• Use Feminist lens to analyze gender roles in the short story “The Starfruit Tree” also contextualizes it through th e Marxist lens of an ideological agenda that limits the economic and social security of rural women in Bangladesh.

How We Use Specific Theories to Pose Questions and Apply Vocabulary

The vocabulary that we apply to analysis and the types of questions that we pose depends on our theoretical lens or lenses. For this course, the literary critical theories that are central to readings of texts in this course are feminist and post-colonial theory.

Feminist Criticism

According to Lois Tyson, “Broadly defined, feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women” (83).

Applying Feminist Criticism

Vocabulary for Analysis

• constructed gender roles
• dehumanization
• feminist / feminism
• objectification
• patriarchal ideology

Some Questions to Pose

• How are women portrayed in the literary work?
• How are women (economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) oppressed by patriarchal ideology in the literary work?
• How are constructed gender roles portrayed and potentially challenged in the literary work?
• How do cultural practices shape the portrayal of women and patriarchy in the literary work?
• How does the literary work challenge patriarchal ideology and the othering of women?

Post-Colonial Criticism

Lois Tyson asserts that “postcolonial criticism seeks to understand the operations—politically, socially, culturally, and psychologically—of colonialist and anticolonialist ideologies” (418).

Applying Post-Colonial Criticism

• colonialist discourse and ideology
• cultural imperialism
• dehumanize / dehumanization
• disruption of cultural identity and practices
• double consciousness
• Eurocentrism
• Orientalism
• race and racism
• How do the colonizers other and dehumanize the indigenous characters in the literary text?
• How does the imposition of colonialist discourse and ideology disrupt the cultural identity and cultural practices of the indigenous characters in the literary text?
• How do the hegemony and the cultural imperialism of the colonizers contribute to the double consciousness of the indigenous characters?
• How does the othering of the indigenous characters reinforce or challenge the dichotomy of colonialist discourse and ideology?

New Historicist and Cultural Criticism

Lois Tyson distinguishes the concerns new historical and cultural criticism share about literary texts as cultural artifacts: “For new historicist critics . . . the literary text and the historical situation from which it emerged are equally important because the text (the literary work) and context (the historical conditions that produced it) are mutually constitutive: they create each other,” whereas, “[f]or cultural critics, a literary text, or any other kind of cultural production, performs cultural work to the extent to which it shapes the cultural experience of those who encounter it, that is to the extent to which it shapes our experiences of members of a cultural group” (291-2, 297).

Applying New Historicist and Cultural Criticism

• Culture, cultural artifacts and cultural work
• Historical milieu
• Ideology and ideological assumptions
• Institutions
• Legal and political policies and social customs
• Material goods
• Marginalized, misrepresented, underrepresented
• Self-positioning
• Socioeconomic systems
• Social meaning and social structures
• Subjectivity
• How does the literary work operate in relation to other historical and cultural texts of its time?
• How does the literary work enforce or subvert traditional or contemporary social behaviors or understandings?
• How does the work represent social groups as powerful or constrained within larger social structures?
• How was the literary work received by readers and critics at the time it was produced?
• How was the literary work’s discourse shaped by or influencing the culture in which it was produced?

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide . New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Writing About Literature Copyright © by Rachael Benavidez and Kimberley Garcia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Creative writing events in april feature industry professionals.

April 10, 2024

Colophon, conversations on publishing, is featuring events on April 17 and 19, free and open to the public. The series, part of the Creative Writing Program, places editors, agents, writers, and other publishing insiders, in conversation about literary careers.

April 17:  Editor and agent discuss publishing industry Legendary editor Sarah Crichton, and agent Jessica Regel, who represents multiple bestsellers, will be in conversation with Creative Writing Program director Timothy Schaffert, about the publishing industry.

For 15 years, Crichton was the publisher of Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of FSG, where she published such award-winning books as "A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier" by Ishmael Beah and "The Silver Linings Playbook" by Matthew Quick. During her time as publisher of Little, Brown, Crichton published Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point," David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest," several books by David Sedaris, and acquired "Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold.

Regel is the founder of Helm Literary. After growing up in Iowa, Regel entered the book industry and became familiar with all components of an author's contract, including foreign, film, and audio rights. She agented Emily Danforth's UNL dissertation, "The Miseducation of Cameron Post." Among her other credits: the bestsellers "Beautiful Little Fools" by Jillian Cantor, "Bad Vibes Only" by Nora McInerny, "All the Ugly and Wonderful Things" by Bryn Greenwood, and many others.

April 19:  Literary Editing and Publishing Poetry Drawing from their work as editors, the two poets will reflect on the role of literature in the advancement of intellectual and cultural modernity in Africa and the United States.

A poet, translator, and essayist, Daniel Simon is assistant director and editor in chief of World Literature Today magazine at the University of Oklahoma, where he also serves on the English, International Studies, and Judaic Studies faculty. The author of two previous verse collections, "Cast Off" (2015) and "After Reading Everything" (2016), his third book of poems, "Under a Gathering Sky," is new from Stephen F. Austin State University Press.

Chibueze Darlington Anuonye, a P.hD student in the English Department, is the curator of "Selfies and Signatures: An Afro Anthology of Short Stories," co-editor of "Daybreak: An Anthology of Nigerian Short Fiction" and editor of "Through the Eye of a Needle: Art in the Time of Coronavirus." Anuonye was longlisted for the 2018 Babishai Niwe African Poetry Award. "Unbound," his co-edited anthology of contemporary Nigerian poetry (with Nduka Otiono), is forthcoming.

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