New Criticism developed in the 1920s30s and peaked in the 1940s50s. Critical essays by T. S.

Eliot, including "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems", influenced some of the ideas of the New Critics, as did books like Practical Criticism and The Meaning of Meaning by the English scholar I. A. Richards.[1] The movement is named after John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics focused on the text of a work of literature and tried to exclude the reader's response, the author's intention, historical and cultural contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis. Their aesthetic concerns were initially outlined in essays like Ransom's "Criticism, Inc." and Allen Tate's "Miss Emily and the Bibliographers." New Critics often performed a "close reading" of the text and believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected and should not be analyzed separately rather than analyzing the literary text itself. Before the New Criticsm became popular, Heather Dubrow notes that the prevailing focus of literary scholarship was on "the study of ethical values and philosophical issues through literature, the tracing of literary history, and . . . political criticsm," and literary scholarship did not focus on analysis of texts.[2] At that time, close readings (or explication de texte) were considered the work of non-academic "critics" (or book reviewers) and not the work of serious scholars. But the New Criticism changed this. Though their interest in textual study initially met with heavy resistance from the establishment, the practice eventually gained a foothold and soon became one of the central methods of literary scholarship in American universities until it fell out of favor in the 1970s as post-structuralism, deconstructionist theory, and a whole plethora of competing theoretical models vied for more attention in literary studies. The New Criticism was never a formal collective, but it initially developed from the teaching methods advocated by John Crowe Ransom who taught at Vanderbilt. Some of his students (all Southerners) like Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren would go on to develop the aesthetics that came to be known as the New Criticism. Nevertheless, in his essay, "The New Criticism," Cleanth Brooks notes that "The New Critic, like the Snark, is a very elusive beast," meaning that there was no clearly defined "New Critical" school or critical stance.[3] Also, although there are a number of classic New Critical writings that outline inter-related ideas, there is no New Critical manifesto. In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled "The Intentional Fallacy", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an author's intention, or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting. In another essay, "The Affective Fallacy," which served as a kind of sister essay to "The Intentional Fallacy" Wimsatt and Beardsley also discounted the reader's personal/emotional reaction to a literary work as a valid means of analyzing a text. This fallacy would later be repudiated by theorists from the readerresponse school of literary theory. Ironically, one of the leading theorists from this school, Stanley Fish, was himself trained by New Critics. Fish criticizes Wimsatt and Beardsley in his essay "Literature in the Reader" (1970).[4] The popularity of the New Criticism persisted through the Cold War years in both American high schools and colleges, in part, because it offered a relatively straightforward (and politically uncontroversial) approach to teaching students how to read and understand poetry and fiction. To this end, Brooks and Warren published Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction which both became standard pedagogical textbooks in American high schools and colleges during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style required careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage itself. Formal elements such as rhyme, meter, setting, characterization, and plot were used to identify the theme of the text. In addition to the theme, the New Critics also looked for paradox, ambiguity, irony, and tension to help establish the single best and most unified interpretation of the text.

Such an approach has been criticized as constituting a conservative attempt to isolate the text and to shield it from external, political concerns such as those of race, class, and gender. Although the New Criticism is no longer a dominant theoretical model in American universities, some of its methods (like close reading) are still fundamental tools of literary criticism, underpinning a number of subsequent theoretic approaches to literature including poststructuralism, deconstruction theory, and reader-response theory. T.S. Eliot enunciates his Theory of Objective Correlative in his famous essay Hamlet and His problem. Eliot calls 'Hamlet' "an artistic failure" because it is wanting in Objective Correlative. Eliot says that every powerful character in a play has a flood of powerful feelings and emotions within his heart which force to express themselves. If the character raves or laments loudly all atone on the stage, the scene would appear to be highly crude and inartistic. His powerful emotions must express themselves through some suggestive objective symbols. These symbols may be objects or unconscious actions. These objective or actions are called objective correlative. Eliot says: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative; in other words a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of the particular emotion; such that when the external facts which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked". The innermost feelings of the character are objectified and externally presented on the stage through these objective correlatives. The best example of objective correlative is found in the "Sleep Walking' scene in Macbeth, where lady Macbeth walks holding a candle and rubbing her hands, as if washing them, and murmuring "all the perfumes of Arabia will not be able to sweeten this little hand". She does over again what she had done before in the scene of king Duncan's murder. These actions of hers are objective correlative of her deeply suppressed feelings of spiritual agony and repentance. In other words, the agony, unexpressed as such, is made so objective here that it can be as well seen by the eyes as felt by the heart.