ABSTRACT
This Chapter explains recent developments in literary theory that have simultaneously challenged conventional definitions of what literature is and on the relationship between anything that a person writes and the extra-textual person that they presumably were. The chapter also focuses on literary criticism, which has been around for a long time, and has often been more bulky than the texts to which it is applied. Some of the practices of literary criticism are indebted to older traditions of exegesis in religious studies. In literary studies, as in the discipline of philosophy itself, there is often a lot of hostility between analytical and Continental approaches, but not always. The analytical approach tends to privilege dispassionate logic, while the Continental one, often in the form of poststructuralism, tends to imply political commitment, it is heavily indebted to Karl Marx and Freud, and seeks to challenge dominant discourses in the world, apparently for the good of us all.
