Literary Approaches

The Song of Achilles

in light of the Four Literary Approaches

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Formalistic Approach

TIn literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as meter and tropes. The formalistic approach reduces the importance of a text's historical, biographical, and cultural context. Formalism rose to prominence in the early twentieth century as a reaction against Romanticist theories of literature, which centered on the artist and individual creative genius, and instead placed the text itself back into the spotlight to show how the text was indebted to forms and other works that had preceded it. Two schools of formalist literary criticism developed, Russian formalism, and soon after Anglo-American New Criticism. Formalism was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the US at least from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s, especially as embodied in René Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (1948, 1955, 1962).

Gender/Feministic and Queer Approach

Queer Approach

Gender/Feministic Approach

Queer literary criticism denotes a range of approaches to textual scholarship that analyze and contest heteronormative structures and relations of meaning.

Feminist criticism, or gender studies, focuses on the role of women (or gender) in a literary text. According to feminist criticism, patriarchy, in its masculine-focused structure, socially dictates the norms for both men and women.

Reader Response Approach

Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or “audience”) and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.