Types
of Literary Criticism
1 1. Legislative Criticism:
There are different types of analysis that have thrived every once in a while. The earliest in time was the legislative criticism. The critic sought to teach writers how to write and laid down canons, rules, formulae of literary composition. Such legislative criticism claims to teach the poet how to write, or how to write better It is the kind, of criticism practised by the Elizabethans, and for half a century after; Sidney apart, nearly all Elizabethan critics directed their remarks. to poets rather than to readers of poetry.
“Their works, generally depressingly deadened, are what might be compared to. the recipe-book and they are based on the MasterChef’s assumption that any pupil of good intelligence can learn the business if only he is shown how."
Legislative criticism is a thing of the past now. "In England, indeed in Western Europe, it dominated the sixteenth century and died in the course of the seventeenth with Dryden representing the point of change. We shall never again see the day when flocks of young poets sought instructions in their craft from rhetoricians. In the' whole English-speaking world, legislative criticism survives, outside the school-room, only in the post-war trickle of handbooks of composition and, 'creative writing, assembled by American academic even the unacknowledged legislators of poets. For three hundred critics for American college students. For the rest, critics are not years they have sensibly sought their public not among poets but among readers of poetry.
2 2. Judicial Criticism:
Next in point of time comes judicial criticism. It
seeks to pronounce judgment on works of literature on the basis of certain
rules. “if work is found to adhere to these rules it is good if not is
condemned as worthless." Such rules were derived, and often wrongly
derived, from the ancient Greek and Latin' masters, special Aristotle and
Horace. All through the classical era, such judicial criticism held sway, and
Dr Johnson may be regarded as the most powerful exponent of this kind of
criticism. He approached poets and their works in the spirit of a hanging judge
and pronounced Works were not judgments in a dogmatic, magisterial manner Works
were Writers not considered on their own individual and distinctive merits.
Writer but on the basis were not assessed on the basis of their performance,
but on the basis or otherwise of their adherence to the well-known classical
rules of literary composition. Obviously, no real evaluation is possible in
this way.
3 3. Theoretical Criticism:
Another important kind of criticism is theoretical
criticism. This kind of criticism deals with literary aesthetics. Attention is
focussed not on particular works, but on literature in general, a study is made
of the process of creation and the basic principles of artistic beauty, and in
this way a literary theory is built-up. In England, theoretical criticism made
its humble beginning in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry.
In the 17th century, Dryden showed keen interest in
literary aesthetics. "From this time onwards, interest shifts away from
such Platonic issues as the nature of poetic truth towards such psychological
questions as the nature of the creative act." By the eighteenth century,
aesthetics is a mania among heathenish in an age when, as Boswell shows, the
theory of beauty formed part of the small talk of polite London drawing-rooms.
From Addison's Essays can the Imagination in The, Speculator of 1712through the
treatises of Lord Kane’s, and Burke's, The Sublime and the Beautiful (1757),
and Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discour8es (1778), the long line comes to an abrupt
end in Coleridge's Biographia Literary (1817). And, there, in England, the
story ends. The Victorians, repelled by Coleridge's obscurity, and impressed
by the rising prestige of historical studies, readily abandoned theoretical
criticism to the Germans.