During the 18th and early 19th centuries, critics were mainly concerned with whether texts conformed to classical models and often viewed the value of texts by the degree to which they conformed or didn’t (Richter, 1998). Classical models were something to be admired and seen as a route to some underlying truth behind culture, a truth tied to an adoration of a lost ideal in the classical world. Scholars developed a key idea during this period: that the reading of important literary works would improve one’s ethical standing. George Eliot (1856) perhaps most elegantly stated this in her essay “The Natural History of German Life.” Reading good books made you a better person. As of the early 20th century, scholars were still justifying the teaching of literature that way, and, indeed, the entry of literary study into public schools was grounded in this idea.
Organized systems of interpreting literature emerged as literature made its way into colleges and secondary schools. These schools of literary criticism each focused on a set of agreed-on philosophical presuppositions that affected, to a large extent, the interpretation that resulted. Initially, there were two important schools of literary criticism: (1) biographical and (2) historical.
Biographical criticism has been around since at least the 18th century, and Samuel Johnson (1779–1781) used it in his important work The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, which was enormously popular right into the 20th century. Biographical criticism is intuitively attractive, particularly to those who place great authors on high pedestals. It suggests that, as every reader suspects, much of what happens in the author’s life impacts his or her writing. Thus, biographical criticism strove to analyze the biographies of writers and find connections to their works to read those works more deeply.
For example, biographical critics would point to profound moments in the life of American novelist Edith Wharton that arguably influenced events in her novel Ethan Frome (1911/1992). Wharton, who grew up in 19th century New York City, was raised in a family that shared all the Victorian taboos about women’s sexual feelings. Taught to ignore emerging desires as an adolescent, her emotions escaped in a frequent and terrifying anxiety every time she returned to her parents’ house. Her fear and anxiety were often so profound she was unable to walk inside the house and had to wait at the threshold for the symptoms to pass (Wharton, 1911/1992). Knowing that episode of Wharton’s biography can be telling when reading Ethan Frome. This novel describes a Massachusetts farmer, a former engineering student, who finds himself locked in a loveless marriage and a career he adopted out of necessity rather than interest. Into this barren life comes his wife’s beautiful cousin Mattie Silver. Ethan resists his growing desire for the beautiful girl but cannot deny it. Throughout the novel, the reader is placed in the position of observing important events from beyond a threshold, often a closed door beyond which things are clearly occurring (but which the reader is not privy to). Perhaps more important is the thematic implication of the threshold, where Ethan wishes to express his desire for Mattie but repeatedly stops before doing so—on the threshold of action, so to speak.
While a biographical reading like this may be correct and inform our understanding of the novel, it is certainly not the only way to read Ethan Frome. One of the limitations of biographical criticism is the way it implies that nonbiographical interpretations of a text are somehow less valid than biographical ones. Further, biographical criticism has an inherent flaw: one must know the author’s biography. The fact is, the biographies of the vast majority of writers are unknown. Even in the case of William Shakespeare, regarded as the greatest playwright in the English language, words like may, might, and could signal the uncertainty and speculation of his biographies. The facts known about Shakespeare are few, and the documents from his life even fewer. Sparse data limit the biographical criticism available on our most important writers. Indeed, biographical criticism would have nothing at all to say about the most prolific author in the English language—anonymous.
Simultaneously with biographical criticism, literary critics also favored a historical view of the analysis of written texts. The basic presupposition of historical criticism is that understanding the historical moment of the text creation—particularly the political, theological, cultural, and social contexts—provides insights into interpretive meanings of texts (Historical criticism, 2014). While history is more readily accessible than an author’s biography, fundamental flaws also exist in this approach to interpreting texts. First, not all historical periods are equally knowable. We know a great deal more, for example, about the French Revolution in the late 18th century than we do about the historical events surrounding the Trojan War. Indeed, some are not even sure the Trojan War was a real historical event. Also, while history is more knowable, the question arises as to whose history is the accepted version. There is an adage that history is written by the winners. There is truth to this, and history students will report that any important historical event viewed from the perspective of the losers looks very different from the commonly accepted version. Further, historical criticism starts from the assumption of the strong effect of the historical moment on the author as he or she composes a text. But surely there have been authors who have not succumbed to that influence or who have, like the French philosopher Montaigne, withdrawn from their own society. There are important examples of this throughout the history of literature; in these cases, the historical critic is unsure how to proceed. Historical criticism, while an important step forward beyond the biographical, was clearly not the answer for literary critics.
Formalism
As literary criticism moved into the 20th century, critics sought to bring a more stringent analysis, one grounded in the intrinsic elements of the text (Richter, 1998)—in other words, those portions of the text that can be identified and analyzed separately, using agreed-on analytical techniques. The result of this effort was what has come to be known as formalism. Formalism sought a scientific approach to interpretation of the written word. At its heart was a fundamental shift in the way critical reading was applied to the written text. Rather than seeing the text as an author’s product or a historical moment, early formalism sought to see the text as an object in and of itself, independent of the influence of anything else. Early American formalists advocated seeing the text as a microcosm—a totally self-referential text world (Richter, 1998). The critical reader approached the text analytically to view that world. To do this, formalism accepts some of the precepts of the scientific method and applies them to the analysis of the written word. Science approaches the understanding of a phenomenon by isolating the object of study and applying a universally agreed-on, carefully defined, repeatable scientific method to its analysis. In applying this to literature, formalists began by isolating the subject of their analysis, the text. They claimed that the influence of an author on his or her writing was not to be considered in interpreting the text. Further, the reader’s reaction, which can vary widely, could not be considered either. If one was to approach a written text scientifically, then the written text on the page must be the sole object of scrutiny (Richter, 1998).
Next, formalists needed a set of analytical tools to apply to the written text. Eventually, these tools became the well-known set of literary strategies still taught in English classes today—the elements of literature. These include plot structure, characterization, point of view, figurative language, tone, and theme, to name a few. In attempting to emulate the repeatability of scientific analysis, formalists advocated a very specific method of analyzing these elements. They claimed that if literary critics all studied the same text and properly analyzed that text through the elements of literature, each critic would arrive independently at the same, single, correct interpretation (Richter, 1998).
In the 21st century, few people would wholly agree with this approach to interpreting texts. Most people have been taught that the influence of the reader in unpacking meaning is as valuable and important as the text itself. Some argue that the author’s intention should also be taken into consideration when interpreting a text (Richter, 1998). Yet formalism had a long run and found advocates well into the 20th century. The idea