New Criticism

noun

: an analytic literary criticism that is marked by concentration on the language, imagery, and emotional or intellectual tensions in literary works

New Critic noun

New Critical adjective

Examples of New Criticism in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

While not for the faint of heart or weary of English poetry, this book introduced New Criticism to the U.S., and reveals the extent of the work any close-reading literary critic takes on. —The Week Us, theweek, 19 Mar. 2024

Read more: The Extreme New Tactic in the Crusade to Ban Books Rosenblatt was pushing back not only against rote learning and the oversimplification of literature in America’s schools, but also against the New Criticism, an approach that was beginning to dominate instruction at the college level. —TIME, 6 Oct. 2023

The New Criticism arose at Vanderbilt, in Nashville, where Davidson taught, and nearly all the first generation of New Critics were Southern partisans and Yankee-haters, opponents of secularism, liberalism, and modernity. —Louis Menand, The New Yorker, 31 July 2023

First, even when Ozick observes a specific cultural moment fifty years in the past—second-wave feminism; Harold Bloom and the not so New Criticism; the relationship between Black and Jewish writers like Ralph Ellison and Irving Howe—her work is blazingly alive. —Cathleen Schine, The New York Review of Books, 16 Mar. 2021

Word History

First Known Use

1941, in the meaning defined above