Book1929
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf
Women's absence from the literary canon reflects centuries of denied money and privacy rather than any lack of talent, and fiction needs both to exist at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Literary Theory & Criticism
Frameworks for reading closely and arguing about it.
12 topics · 13 curated works
Topics
- 01Foundations & Overviews1
- 02Close Reading1
- 03Formalism & New Criticism1
- 04Structuralism in Literature1
- 05Post-Structuralism & Deconstruction1
- 06Marxist Criticism1
- 07Feminist Criticism1
- 08Postcolonial Criticism1
- 09Psychoanalytic Criticism1
- 10Reader-Response Theory2
- 11Narratology1
- 12The Canon Debate1
Reading in Literary Theory & Criticism
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No prior grounding assumed.
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf · 1929
Women's absence from the literary canon reflects centuries of denied money and privacy rather than any lack of talent, and fiction needs both to…
Then
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Culture and Anarchy
Matthew Arnold · 1869
A society needs a shared standard of 'the best that has been thought and said' to check the pull of class self-interest and mere machinery, an…
+7 more at this level
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Primary sources and full treatments.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin · 1935
Mechanical reproduction strips a work of art of its 'aura' — its unique presence in time and place — detaching it from ritual and making it available…
+3 more at this level
12 of 13 works
Book1869
Culture and Anarchy
Matthew Arnold
A society needs a shared standard of 'the best that has been thought and said' to check the pull of class self-interest and mere machinery, an argument that became the founding target for every later challenge to the idea of a literary canon.
about 4.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Paper1910
The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: A Study in Motive
Ernest Jones
Hamlet's paralysis in the face of a clear duty to avenge his father is explained by unconscious guilt: killing Claudius would mean punishing an act — taking his father's place with his mother — that Hamlet himself unconsciously desires.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Essay1919
Tradition and the Individual Talent
T. S. Eliot
A poet's significance comes from how their work situates itself inside the whole existing order of literature, not from personal emotion; the poet's mind is best understood as a catalyst that fuses feeling into form without appearing in it, which grounds the New Critical case for judging the poem and not the poet.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Book1928
Morphology of the Folktale
Vladimir Propp
Russian fairy tales, however different their surface content, share a fixed sequence of at most thirty-one narrative functions performed by seven recurring character roles, proving that a story's structure can be studied independently of what it is about.
PaidIntermediate
Book1929
Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment
I. A. Richards
Anonymous student responses to unattributed poems, collected and analysed, show that readers' habits of sentiment, stock associations and technical presupposition do far more to determine a verdict than the poem itself — the founding case for training readers to notice what they bring to a text.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Essay1967
The Death of the Author
Roland Barthes
A text's meaning is not fixed by the author's biography or stated intentions but is produced anew in the act of reading, so criticism should stop asking what a writer meant and start asking what a text does.
PaidIntermediate
Essay1972
The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach
Wolfgang Iser
Reading is a phenomenological transaction rather than a decoding: a literary text is deliberately full of gaps, and meaning is produced only when the reader's imagination fills them in, so the same text yields a different concrete experience for every reader.
PaidIntermediate
Series2009
Introduction to Theory of Literature with Paul H. Fry
Paul H. Fry (YaleCourses)
Works through twentieth-century literary theory school by school, treating each as an answer to the question of where meaning is located — in the text, the author, the reader or the system.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Essay1935
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin
Mechanical reproduction strips a work of art of its 'aura' — its unique presence in time and place — detaching it from ritual and making it available instead for political use, for emancipation or, in fascism's hands, for the aestheticisation of politics.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeAdvanced
Book1961
The Wretched of the Earth
Frantz Fanon
Colonial rule is a structure of violence from the start, so decolonisation is necessarily also a violent, totalising process, and the national culture that follows must be built new rather than recovered from a pre-colonial past.
PaidAdvanced
Essay1966
Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives
Roland Barthes
Every narrative, however different its surface content, can be decomposed into a finite set of functions and levels of description borrowed from linguistics, so that narrative itself — not any one story — becomes the object of study.
PaidAdvanced
In order written
1869 – 2009- 1869Culture and AnarchyMatthew Arnold
- 1919Tradition and the Individual TalentT. S. Eliot
- 1928Morphology of the FolktaleVladimir Propp
- 1929A Room of One's OwnVirginia Woolf
- 1929Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary JudgmentI. A. Richards
- 1935The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical ReproductionWalter Benjamin
- 1961The Wretched of the EarthFrantz Fanon
- 1966Introduction to the Structural Analysis of NarrativesRoland Barthes
- 1967The Death of the AuthorRoland Barthes
- 1972The Reading Process: A Phenomenological ApproachWolfgang Iser
- 1980Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive CommunitiesStanley Fish
- 2009Introduction to Theory of Literature with Paul H. FryPaul H. Fry (YaleCourses)