Timeline of Literary Criticism: From Classicism to New Criticism

 

Timeline of Literary Criticism: From Classicism to New Criticism

 

Phase	Period	Key Features	Key Figures / Works
Classicism	Ancient Greece & Rome	Order, reason, imitation of classical models; poetry as moral instruction	Plato (Republic), Aristotle (Poetics), Horace
Medieval Criticism	5th–15th century	Religious and allegorical interpretation; Biblical exegesis; literature subordinate to faith	St. Augustine, Dante (Divine Comedy)
Renaissance / Neoclassicism	16th–18th century	Rules, rationality, decorum, imitation of classical forms	Philip Sidney (Defence of Poesie), Dryden, Pope
Romantic Criticism	late 18th – mid 19th c.	Emotion, imagination, originality, genius of the poet	Wordsworth (Preface to Lyrical Ballads), Coleridge
Victorian Criticism	19th century	Literature as moral and social force; cultural criticism	Matthew Arnold (The Study of Poetry)
Modernism	early 20th century	Form, aesthetics, fragmentation, artistic experimentation	T.S. Eliot (Tradition and the Individual Talent), Ezra Pound
Psychoanalytic Criticism	late 19th – 20th c.	Id/Ego/Superego, unconscious, repression, archetypes, symbolism	Freud, Jung, Lacan
New Criticism	1920s–1940s	The text itself; close reading; rejection of authorial intention & reader response	Wimsatt & Beardsley, Cleanth Brooks