A brief introduction to British and American new criticism

It is one of the most influential schools in modern British and American literary criticism. It originated in Britain in the 1920s, formed in the 1930s and became a major trend in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. In the late 1950s, the new criticism gradually declined, but the text-based semantic analysis advocated and practiced by the new criticism is still one of the basic methods of literary criticism, which has a far-reaching impact on today's literary criticism, especially poetry criticism.

The word "new criticism" originated from the book "New Criticism" published by American literary critic Lanson 194 1, but the origin of this genre can be traced back to Eliot and Richards.

Eliot can be regarded as a pioneer of new criticism. In the article Tradition and Personal Talent, he put forward an important argument-impersonal theory, which constitutes the cornerstone of the new critical literary theory. Eliot emphasized that criticism should shift from writers to works and from poets to poetry itself. It was Richards who provided the methodological basis for the new criticism. He drew people's attention to language by introducing semantics.

There are several generations of critics in the new criticism. The early representatives were Hume in Britain and Pound in America. The second generation is Jenson and Lansham, and the third generation is Wellek and Vincent. Together, they completed the theoretical system of new criticism.