Nineteenth-century American literary criticism had been preoccupied with a number of themes, such as searching for and expressing a national identity, formulating organicist, transcendental and Romantic conceptions of art, struggling against commercialism and mechanism, debating the relative virtues and possible compromise of romance and realism, of tradition and originality, as well as the autonomous or didactic nature of literature. Some of these concerns were inherited by twentieth-century American literary criticism. Reacting against the romance fiction of figures such as Hawthorne and Melville, William Dean Howells had expressed a theory of realism in Criticism and Fiction (1891). Another realist around the turn of the century was Hamlin Garland who advocated "veritism," a local literature based on individual insight and committed to truth. In his "A Plea for Romantic Fiction" (1901) and The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903), Frank Norris identified the limitations of realism and advanced a manifesto of naturalism in the vein of Emile Zola.
 

The quest for national identity and an American tradition was continued in works such as John Macy's The Spirit of American Literature (1913), which urged a separation of literature and morality, and Randolph Bourne's Youth and Life (1911), which argued that tradition should be revaluated and its positive elements utilised in defining the central aspects of American culture. Similarly, in America's Coming of Age (1915), Van Wyck Brooks called for a review of the past and the formulation of a viable tradition which might sustain American writers. The attack on commercialism and philistinism was continued both by Brooks and by publications such as Civilization in the United States (1922), a collection of pieces by thirty authors. Another major American critical voice around the turn of the century was that of W.C. Brownell who, somewhat influenced by Matthew Arnold, sought to establish literary criticism as a serious, substantive and original activity in its own right, rather than as merely adjectival upon works of art. Later works in this vein, concerning the uses to be made of an American past and the connection between literature and criticism, included Howard Mumford Jones' The Theory of American Literature (1948) and Vernon L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought (1927-30). Also current in the early twentieth century was impressionism, perhaps best represented by the work of James Gibbons Huneker and H.L. Mencken. Both men attacked Puritanism and insisted on addressing the aesthetic elements in art as divorced from moral considerations. Other notable names of this period include George Edward Woodberry who viewed literature as instrumental in the achievement of humanity, and George Santayana whose The Sense of Beauty (1896) attempted to ground criticism on a psychological basis.
 

Hence, around the beginning of the twentieth century, several themes and tendencies were alive in American literary criticism: the search for American identity and tradition, inquiries into the merits of naturalism and realism, debates concerning the autonomy of literature, and attempts to establish literary criticism as a serious, even scientific, discipline. The predominant critical modes were biographical, historical, psychological, romantic and impressionistic, with these various approaches often overlapping in the work of any given critic.
 

Many of these critical impulses and concerns underlay a wide-ranging polemic initiated by the so-called "New Humanists." Led by Harvard professor Irving Babbitt and including figures such as Paul Elmer More, Norman Foerster and Stuart Sherman, the New Humanists were conservative in their cultural and political outlook, reacting against what they saw as a relativistic disorder of styles and approaches characterizing early twentieth-century America. They rejected the predominant tendencies stemming from the liberal-bourgeois tradition: a narrow focus on the present at the expense of the past and of tradition; unrestrained freedom in political, moral and aesthetic domains; a riot of pluralism, a mechanical exaltation of facts and an uninformed worship of science. As Babbitt put it, "Man has gained immensely in his grasp on facts, but...has become so immersed in their multiplicity as to lose that vision of the One by which his lower self was onced overawed and restrained." Indeed, for Babbitt, the problem of the One and the Many, of perceiving unity in the diversity of our experience, was "the ultimate problem of thought..."
 

Babbitt's ideas represented one side of a newly-awakened debate between Ancients and Moderns, a debate often grounded in educational concerns. Babbitt opposed reformists such as Harvard University President Charles Eliot and John Dewey who urged that the College education system should be brought into line with prevailing bourgeois scientific and economic interests. Babbitt, somewhat incoherently, sees these interests as descended primarily from Rousseau, as the father both of democracy and Romanticism. In Rousseau and Romanticism (1919) and other works, Babbitt seeks to oppose Romantic "excess" (which for him comprehends the bourgeois traits noted above) with Classical moderation and restraint, with a focus on what is "normal" and "universal" in human experience, and especially with a return to tradition in the seeking of moral and aesthetic value. Babbitt sees the literary criticism of his time as pervaded with the disease of impressionism; as against this, he calls for objective judgement and impersonality based on comparative and historical methods.
 

The influence of the Humanists reached its peak in the 1920's and waned during the 1930's when they were challenged both by rival humanists, such as Lewis Mumford, by more liberal-minded critics such as Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate and R.P. Blackmur, by philosophers such as George Santayana who pointed to their inconsistencies, as well as by the left-wing and Marxist critics discussed below. Other schools of criticism also rejected the New Humanism: the Chicago School, the New York Intellectuals and the New Critics reacted against the New Humanists' subordination of aesthetic value to moral criteria and their condemnation of modern and innovative literature. Perhaps the single most important circumstance behind the eclipse of the Humanists lay in social conditions in America during the 1930's: the depression, widespread unemployment and suffering caused by economic collapse, perhaps generated a need for more socially conscious criticism rather than Humanist criticism which had focused on perfecting the individual.
 

However, the New Humanists exerted a profound impact on the most influential American (and later British) critic of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot, whose early ideas owed a great deal to their emphasis on tradition, classicism and impersonality. Eliot was also indebted to later nineteenth century French poets and particularly to Ezra Pound and the imagist movement. Pound assumed a broad range of critical roles: as poet-critic, he promoted his own work and the works of figures such as Frost, Joyce and Eliot; he translated numerous texts from Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek and Chinese; and, associating with various schools such as imagism and vorticism, he advocated a poetry which was concise, concrete, precise in expression of emotion, and appropriately informed by a sense tradition. As a result of his suggestions, Eliot's major poem The Waste Land was radically condensed and transformed. Eliot took his so-called theory of "tradition" from both Babbitt and Pound. This theory claimed that the major works of art, both past and present, form an "ideal order" which is continually modified by subsequent works of art. The central implication here was that contemporary writers should find common ground with that tradition even as they extended it. Eliot effectively succeeded in redefining the European literary tradition, continuing the Humanists' onslaught against the Romantics, and bringing into prominence Dante, the Metaphysical poets and the French symbolists. Eliot also advanced an "impersonal" notion of poetry, whereby the poet expresses not a personality but a precise formulation of thought and feeling such as is lacking in "ordinary" experience. The poet, according to Eliot, employs an "objective correlative," whereby objects and events in the external world are used to express complexes of thought and emotion. In terms of literary history, Eliot held that a "dissociation of sensibility" had set in after the seventeenth century which entailed a disjunction of various human faculties such as reason and emotion which had previously been integrated within a unified sensibility. Eliot's ideas bore an ambivalent relationship with the claims of the New Criticism. On the one hand, he believed that the aesthetic dimension of works of art is irreducible; on the other, he believed, with increasing insistence throughout his career, that art is irreducibly bound to its social, religious and literary context. The ideas of Pound and Eliot have had a lasting influence but their most forceful impact occurred between the 1920s and the 1940s.
 

While Eliot and Pound were urging a return to Classical values, the decade of the 1930s in America witnessed the rise of a number of distinct critical modes: left-wing and Marxist criticism; the Aristotelian criticism of the Chicago school; the so-called New York intellectuals; and the New Criticism. All of these were in various ways underlain by the Great Depression of the 1930's.
 

During this decade of economic collapse, Marxism became a significant political force. Socially and politically conscious criticism had a long heritage in America, going back to figures such as Whitman, Howells and Emerson and running through the work of writers noted above such as John Macy, Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon L. Parrington. Notable Marxist critics of the 1920's and 1930's included Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, V.F. Calverton, Philip Rahv and Granville Hicks. Eastman and Dell edited the important radical journal The Masses and then The Liberator (1918-24). Both produced works of literary criticism, Dell relating literary history to social causes and Eastman unothordoxically treating poetry as a distinct domain. Calverton and Hicks were perhaps the most prominent of the Marxist critics; the former founded The Modern Quarterly: A Journal of Radical Opinion, which later became The Modern Monthly. In The Newer Spirit (1925) he urges that aesthetic judgements are conditioned by a reader's background and that a work must be interpreted and judged in relation to the social structure which generated it. In The Liberation of American Literature (1932) Calverton interprets the tradition of American literature in terms of Marxist categories such as class and economic infrastructure. Granville Hicks became a Communist during the depression and his The Great Tradition (1933) he assesses American writers in terms of their social and political awareness and their relevance to social progress and their contribution to the development of proletarian awareness and literature. In other works, Hicks had acknowledged that literary achievement and ideological disposition were not intrinsically related. This period saw the gowth of a number of other radical journals as well as the voicing of revolutionary views by non-Marxist critics such as Kenneth Burke and Edmund Wilson. The latter's most influential work, Axel's Castle (1931) traced the development of modern symbolist literature, identifying in this broad movement a "revolution of the word," which might open up new possibilities of thought and literature.
 

Liberal critics such as Parrington and F.O. Matthiessen employed an historical approach to literature but Matthiessen insisted on addressing its aesthetic dimensions. This formalist disposition became intensified in both the New Criticism and the Chicago school. The term "The New Criticism" was coined as early as 1910 in a lecture of that title by Joel Spingarn who, influenced by Croce's expressionist theory of art, advocated a creative and imaginative criticism which gave primacy to the aesthetic qualities of literature over historical, psychological and moral considerations. Spingarn, however, was not directly related to the New Criticism which developed in subsequent decades. Some of the important features of the New Criticism originated in England during the 1920's in the work of T.S. Eliot (as noted earlier) as well as in seminal studies by I.A. Richards and William Empson. Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) advanced literary-critical notions such as irony, tension and balance, as well as distinguishing between poetic and other uses of language. His Practical Criticism (1929), based on student analyses of poetry, emphasised the importance of "objective" and balanced close reading which was sensitive to the figurative language of literature. Richards' student William Empson produced an influential work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which was held up as a model of New Critical close reading.
 

Across the Atlantic, New Critical practices were also being pioneered by American critics, known as the Fugitives and the Southern Agrarians who promoted the values of the Old South in reaction against the alleged dehumanization of science and technology in the industrial North. Notable among these pioneers were John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate who developed some of the ideas of Eliot and Richards. Ransom edited the poetry magazine The Fugitive from 1922-25 with a group of writers including Tate, Robert Penn Warren and Donald Davidson. Other journals associated with the New Criticism included The Southern Review, edited by Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks (1935-1942), The Kenyon Review, run by Ransom (1938-59), and the still extant The Sewanee Review, edited by Tate and others. During the forties, the New Criticism became institutionalised as the mainstream approach in academia and its influence, while pervasively undermined since the fifties, still persists. Some of the central documents of New Criticism were written by relatively late adherents: W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's essays "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946) and "The Affective Fallacy" (1949) (it is worth noting, in this context, the enormous influence of E.D. Hirsch's book Validity in Interpretation, published in 1967, which equated a text's meaning with its author's intention); Austin Warren's The Theory of Literature (1949); W.K. Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon (1954); and Murray Krieger's The New Apologists for Poetry (1956). The seminal manifestoes of the New Criticism, however, had been proclaimed earlier by Ransom who published a series of essays entitled The New Criticism (1941) and an influential essay "Criticism, Inc.," published in The World's Body (1938). This essay succintly expresses a core of New Critical principles underlying the practice of most "New Critics," whose views often differed in other respects. As Ransom acknowledges, his essay is motivated by the desire to make literary criticism more scientific, precise and systematic; it must, says Ransom, become a "serious business." He urges that the emphasis of criticism must move from historical scholarship to aesthetic appreciation and understanding. Ransom characterizes both the conservative New Humanism and left-wing criticism as focusing on morality rather than aesthetics. While he accepts the value of historical and biographical information, Ransom insists that these are not ends in themselves but instrumental to the real aim of criticism, which is "to define and enjoy the aesthetic or characteristic values of literature."

In short, Ransom's position is that the critic must study literature, not about literature. Hence criticism should exclude: (1) personal impressions, because the critical activity should "cite the nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject"; (2) synopsis and paraphrase, since the plot or story is an abstraction from the real content of the text; (3) historical studies, which might include literary backgrounds, biography, literary sources and analogues; (4) linguistic studies, which include identifying allusions and meanings of words; (5) moral content, since this is not the whole content of the text; (6) "Any other special studies which deal with some abstract or prose content taken out of the work". Ransom demands that criticism, whose proper province includes technical studies of poetry, metrics, tropes and fictiveness, should "receive its own charter of rights and function independently." Finally, in this essay and other works, Ransom insists on the ontological uniqueness of poetry, as distinct from prose and other uses of language. All in all, he argues that literature and literary criticism should enjoy autonomy both ontologically and institutionally. His arguments have often been abbreviated into a characterization of New Criticism as focusing on "the text itself" or "the words on the page."
 

Another group of critics, known as the Chicago School or the Neo-Aristotelians, began formulating their central ideas around the same time as the New Critics were voicing their manifestoes. In the thirties, departments of humanities at the University of Chicago were undergoing a radical transformation in an attempt to revive them and make them institutionally more competetive with the sciences. Six of the figures later known as the Chicago critics were involved in these changes: R.S. Crane, Richard McKeon, Elder Olson, W.R. Keast, Norman Maclean and Bernard Weinberg. These critics later produced the central manifesto of the Chicago School, Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (1952), which both attacked some of the important tenets of the New Criticism and elaborated an alternative formalistic method of criticism derived in part from Aristotle's Poetics. In an earlier essay of 1934, Crane had anticipated (and influenced) Ransom's call that professional criticism should move from a primarily historical towards an aesthetic focus. However, Crane and the Chicago School generally diverged from the New Criticism in their insistence that literary study should integrate both systematic theory of literature (being informed by the history of literary theory) and the practice of close reading and explication of literary texts. Moreover, the Chicago School drew from Aristotle's Poetics a number of characteristic critical concerns, such as the emphasis on literary texts as "artistic wholes," the analytical importance of locating individual texts within given genres, and the need to identify textual and generic (as opposed to authorial) intention. Whereas the New Critics had focused attention on specifically poetic uses of language, irony, metaphor, tension and balance, the Chicago School followed Aristotle in emphasizing plot, character and thought. In general, the Neo-Aristotelians offered an alternative formalist poetics which acknowledged the mimetic, didactic and affective functions of literature. The influence of this school, however, was overshadowed by the widespread adoption of New Critical dispositions throughout the American education system.
 

Before discussing various other and more widespread reactions against the New Criticism, a few words should be said about the "New York Intellectuals." These were a group of critics who produced their most significant work between the thirties and the sixties and who wrote extensively for radical journals such as the Partisan Review, The New Republic, The Nation, Commentary and Dissent. Major figures in this group included Richard Chase, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling, Elizabeth Hardwick, Sidney Hook, Steven Marcus, Richard poirier, Meyer Schapiro and Susan Sontag. Taking the work of Edmund Wilson as a model, these writers considered themselves aloof from bourgeois society, commercialism, Stalinism and mass culture; they viewed themselves as democratic socialists and wrote criticism with a social and political emphasis. They promoted literary modernism, and valued complexity, irony and cosmopolitanism in literature. This broad critical movement (if such a diverse range of critical activity can be called such) was never institutionalized though it was continued into the eighties, confined within small circles.
 

Much criticism since the fifties can be regarded as an implicit impugnment of widely-institutionalized New Critical practices. A sustained challenge came from structuralism and some of its descendants such as deconstruction. In the West, the influx of structuralism was to some extent anticipated in the work of the Canadian Northrop Frye, who was the most influential theorist in America of what is called Myth Criticism, which was in vogue from the forties to the mid-sixties and whose practitioners included Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, Daniel Hoffman and Philip Wheelwright. Drawing on the findings of anthropology and psychology regarding universal myths, rituals and folktales, these critics were intent on restoring spiritual content to a world they saw as alienated, fragmented and ruled by scientism, empiricism, positivism and technology. They wished to redeem the role of myth, which might comprehend magic, imagination, dreams, intuition and the unconscious.

They viewed the creation of myth as inetgral to human thought, and believed that literature emerges out of a core of myth, where "myth" is understood as a collective attempt on the part of various cultures and groups to establish a meaningful context for human existence. Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) continued the formalist emphasis of the New Criticism but insisted even more strongly that criticism should be a scientific, objective and systematic discipline. Moreover, Frye held that such literary criticism views literature as a system. For example, the mythoi of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter gave rise to fundamental literary modes such as comedy, tragedy, irony and romance. Given the recurrence of basic symbolic motifs, literary history is a repetitive and self-contained cycle. Hence the historical element ostensibly informing Frye's formalism is effectively abrogated, literature being viewed as a timeless, static and autonomous construct.
 

Frye's static model, exhibiting recurrent patterns, is a feature shared by structuralist views of language and literature. Structuralism itself was imported into America from France during the sixties and its leading exponents included Roman Jakobson, Jonathan Culler, Michael Riffaterre, Claudio Guillen, Gerald Prince and Robert Scholes. Other American thinkers working in the field of semiotics have included C.S. Peirce, Charles Morris and Noam Chomsky. The foundations of structuralism were laid in the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose insights were developed by the French anthroplogist Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and others. In his Course in General Linguistics (1916), Saussure distinguished langue, the system and rules of language, from parole or speech. It was the former, according to Saussure, which lent itself to synchronic structural analysis: the system of language could be analyzed at a given point in time as a set of interdependent elements (as opposed to a diachronic study which looked at developments over time). Moreover, Saussure attacked the conventional correspondence theory of meaning whereby language was viewed as a naming process, each word corresponding to the thing it names. Saussure urges that the sign unites not a thing and a name but a concept (signified) and sound-image (signifier). He argues that the bond between signifier and signified is arbitrary (and not natural) in that a concept is not intrinsically linked to a particular signifier. The meaning is determined by collective behaviour or convention and is fixed by rules. Hence language is a system of signs and meaning itself is relational, produced by interaction of various signifiers and signifieds within that system. In addition to these insights, what Levi-Strauss and others took from Saussure was an emphasis on linguistic features described as structures (Strauss himself saw myth as a particular kind of language); they also stressed the deep structures underlying various phenomena and sometimes referred these structures to basic characteristics of the human mind. Also entailed in structuralist analyses is the anti-humanist view that, since language is an institution, individual human agency is unprivileged, neither human beings nor social phenomena having essences.
 

Many of these principles underlay the methods of American structuralists. In his renowned study Structuralist Poetics (1975), Jonathan Culler explained that structuralist investigations of literature would seek to identify the systems of conventions underlying literature. Robert Scholes, in Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974), sought a scientific basis for the study of literature as an interconnected system of various texts. Other key texts of structuralism in America included a special issue of Yale French Studies (1966), and volumes entitled Structuralism (1970) edited by Jacques Ehrmann and The Structuralist Controversy (1970) edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Also influential in America was the work of Roman Jakobson who taught for many years at various American universities, and who worked out an influential model of communication as well as a distinction between metaphor and metonymy in the analysis of narratives.
 

By the time that structuralism was introduced in America, it had already spawned its own critique in the work of the French thinker Jacques Derrida who for several years was affiliated with American universities.At the heart of Derrida's project was a concerted assault against what he termed "logocentrism" which he sees as pervading Western thought. Logocentrism is the attempt to centre one's discourse on the stability of a "transcendental signified" outside of the discourse itself and acting as its foundation. Such transcendental signifieds include the Logos, the idea of substance, matter, Platonic forms, the Hegelian absolute, and the various hierarchical oppositions which sustain these, such as speech/writing, sense/intellect, body/soul, and center/margin. Structuralism itself, according to Derrida, was not free of these traits. In a seminal paper, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," presented in 1966, Derrida argued that the notion of structure self-contradictorily entailed a notion of a center as both the foundation of, and external to, a given structure. In this paper, Derrida drew on the insights of Levi-Strauss and also took from structuralism its foregrounding of language in conducting any type of analysis.
 

Derrida's influence in America was unparalleled in the latter twentieth century. His American disciples included the Yale critics Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman as well as Barbara Johnson and, arguably, Harold Bloom. These critics applied and extended Derridean techniques such as searching for impasses or aporiai in various texts, displaying the hidden presuppositions and contradictions of literary and philosophical works, and demonstrating how their central claims and oppositions undermined themselves. In Blindness and Insight (1971), for example, de Man argues that the insights produced by critics are intrinsically linked to certain blindnesses, the critics invariably affirming something other than what they intended. De Man's Allegories of Reading (1979) explores the theory of tropes or figurative language, affirming that language is intrinsically metaphorical and that literary texts above all are highly self-conscious of their status as such and are self-deconstructing. Hence criticism inevitably misreads a text, given that figurative language mediates between literary and critical text.
 

Harold Bloom, also centrally concerned with the function of tropes in literature, is best known for his assessment of poetic tradition on the basis of the "anxiety of influence." Each writer, asserts Bloom, attempts to carve out an imaginative space free from overt domination by his or predecessors; to this end, as Bloom argues in A Map of Misreading (1975), the writer assumes an Oedipal disposition, creatively misreading those predecessors or "fathers" by way of certain tropes such as irony, synechdoche and metonymy.
 

A number of other critical tendencies have enjoyed popularity in America between the seventies and the nineties. One of these is the so-called New Historicism, developed primarily by Stephen Greenblatt and influenced by Michel Foucault's insistence on viewing literary discourse within a larger social framework of political, religious and other discourses, with especial emphasis on the fabric of power. New Historicists tend to emphasize the plural and discontinuous nature of history as well as the impossibility of an entirely detached and objective approach to the past. In other words, history itself is a series of texts. Reader-Response theory has had its American exponents, such as Stanley Fish, Norman Holland and David Bleich, who have generally located the meaning of a literary text within the interaction between text and reader, as framed by an institutional community of interpretation.
 

Feminist criticism in America received a major stimulus from the Civil Rights movement of the sixties, and has differed somewhat in its concerns from its counterparts in France and Britain, notwithstanding the undoubted impact of earlier figures such as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. A seminal work, The Feminine Mystique (1963) was authored by Betty Friedan, who subsequently founded the National Organisation of Women in 1966. This widely-received book expressed the fundamental grievance of middle class American women, their entrapment within private, domestic life and their inability to pursue public careers. A number of other important feminist texts were produced around this time: Mary Ellman's Thinking About Women (1968), Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1969), Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970) and Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970). Millett's influential book concerned female sexuality and the representation of women in literature. It argued that patriarchy was a political institution which relied on subordinated roles for women. It also distinguished between the concept of "sex," which was rooted in biology, and that of "gender," which was culturally acquired. Other critics in this tradition of examining masculine portayals of women included Carolyn Heilbrun and Judith Fetterly.
 

A number of feminist texts have attempted to identify alternative and neglected traditions of female writing. These have included Patricia Meyer Spacks' The Female Imagination (1975), Ellen Moers' Literary Women (1976), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). The most influential work of this kind was Elaine Showalter's A Literature of their Own (1977), which traced three phases of women's writing, a "feminine" phase (1840-1880) where women writers imitated male models, a "feminist" phase (1880-1920) during which women challenged those models and their values, and a "female" phase (from 1920) which saw women advocating their own perspectives. Recent debates within American feminism, conducted by figures such as Showalter, Lillian Robinson, Annette Kolodny and Jane Marcus, have concerned the relationship of female writers to male theories, the need for feminist theory and an female language, the relation of feminism to poststructuralist perspectives, as well as continuing problems of political and educational activism.

Also hotly debated has been the possible connection of feminism and Marxism.Michele Barrett's Women's Oppression Today: Probelms in Marxist Feminist Analysis (1980) attempts to reconcile Marxist and feminist principles in analyzing the representation of gender.Other works in this vein include Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt's Feminist Criticism and Social Change (1985) which also argues for feminist analysis which takes account of social and economic contexts. A notable recent development has been the attempt to think through feminism from Black and minority perspectives, as in Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983) and Barbara Smith's Toward a Black Feminist Criticism (1977). Finally, significant contributions by Lesbian critics include Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology (1978) and Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980).
 

Recent trends in American criticism have included postcolonial and minority perspectives. A seminal influence on postcolonial criticism was Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961), as well as Edward Said's landmark work Orientalism (1978). These texts drew attention to "Third-World" struggles and dilemmas and the imposition of Western values and constructs upon other cultures. Other influences on postcolonial criticism have included Derrida's critique of Western metaphysics, and Gramsci's notion of political and cultural hegemony. Significant figures in this mode of criticism are Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhaba. Minority perspectives have been advanced by figures such as Henry Louis Gates in his Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988). Gates draws attention to the complex inheritance of African-American writers as drawing on both Western and African traditions in the use of peculiar tropes.
 

Finally, it is worth noting the irony that, in an era where Marxism has often been viewed as "dead," America has produced a major Marxist theorist in the Hegelian tradition, Fredric Jameson, whose work has complemented the enormous popularity in America of the writings of the English Marxist Terry Eagleton. Jameson's major works such as Marxismand Form (1971), The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) all attempt in their various ways to rethink the connections between literature and broader cultural/political contexts in terms of the dialectical categories of Hegelian Marxism, while drawing on psychoanalysis and various elements of structuralism and poststructuralism. The work of both Eagleton and Jameson highlights the fact that debate within the various branches of American literary theory is still very much alive. All in all, it is evident that American literary criticism has produced a rich native tradition while it continues to be enriched by external developments, in Europe and elsewhere, which have been adapted to American cultural, political and educational contexts.
 

Bibliography
 

Foerster, Norman. American Criticism: Studies in Literary Theory from Poe to the Present. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928.

Glicksberg, Charles J. American Literary Criticism 1900-1950. New York: Hendricks House, 1951.

Leitch, Vincent B. American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Smith, Bernard. Forces in American Criticism: A Study in the History of American Literary Thought. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1971.

Spikes, Michael P. Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.

Stovall, Floyd, ed. The Development of American Literary Criticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955.

Sutton, Walter. Modern American Criticism. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963.