What Is Literary Criticism?

This is a (short) introduction to literary criticism. It is a book about literary criticism and so, by necessity, it is not a book of literary criticism. It’s a truism to say that the literary critic’s object of study is literature. A book about literary criticism, then, is only indirectly a book about literature. For this reason, thorny questions as to what constitutes “literature” will have to be left aside at the outset, but it covers: novels, poems and plays, certainly, and much else besides. A literary critic, or a philosopher, might well ask: what is literature?

What is writing? Why does one write?

For whom?

The French philosopher, literary critic and communist, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) asked these very questions in 1947.

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