1. Liberal Humanism:
a) liberal humanism is the study of unchanged nature, moral values, basic human values and universal truth in all forms of literature.
b) According to liberal humanism literature is timeless.
c) No preconceived notions are not necessary to analyze and explain a text, rather any text could be understood based on the elements or meaning provided by the text itself.
2. Formalism:
a)Formalism is the study of the form of a text
b) This theory basically focuses on the elements, style, and forms of a text-based on which any text could be understood without considering any preconceived notions or outside knowledge about the text.
c) Focusing on the poetic language, the formalists said that instead of subjective analysis, this theory focuses on objective analysis of the techniques and devices to get the implicit meaning.
3. New criticism:
a) New literary criticism invented out of the formalist movement in America in the early twentieth-century with the hands of John Crowe Ransom.
b) In twentieth-century literature, poetry became more acceptable to the readers and they focus on the significance of reading literature, mainly poetry, to understand how poetry functioned as a “self-contained” or self-referential aesthetic object by taking a text as an autonomous object, non-related to the author, the culture, or the event it stems from.
c) . The readers didn’t need outside sources to understand a text, rather this term urged them to have a close reading of the text.
4. Structuralism:
a) Structuralism is an intellectual movement that began in France in the 1950s.
b) Analyse a text relating it to some larger containing structure.
c) This theory beliefs that things cannot be understood in isolation.
5. Poststructuralism:
a) A critical and comprehensive response to the basic assumptions of structuralism.
b) Doesn't just focus on a close reading, rather other preconceived notions of a text are also required.
c) A rebellion against structuralism.