Introducing Literary Criticism A Graphic - Owen Holland 2015

Some 20th-Century Approaches: Three Types of Formalism

By contrast, the writers discussed next are primarily remembered (and studied) for their work as literary critics, even though some of them also wrote poetry. These writers were key figures in the consolidation of literary criticism as an academic discipline in the early 20th century.

The three critical trends surveyed here hardly belong to a homogeneous set, but their shared focus on the specificity of the literary text, rather than wider context, and their close attention to form, situates them in the same extended family of formalism.