ABSTRACT
Two groups of critics have had a major influence on the identity and direction of twentieth-century English studies: the Russian and central European Formalists and the more disparate collection of British and American teachers and writers whose academic careers began during the 1920s and 1930s. The term New Criticism is often applied to the latter group. The objectives of the majority of individuals in each group were the same: to define literature as a discourse and art form and to establish its function as something that can be properly studied. Until the late 1950s the work of these groups remained within mutually exclusive geographical and academic contexts: the New Critics in Britain and America and the Formalists in Europe. During the 1960s New Criticism and Formalism began to recognize similarities and overlaps in their goals and methods. Since the 1960s their academic predominance has been unsettled by a much broader network of interdisciplinary practices: structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism and new historicism, are all significant elements of contemporary literary studies, and each draws its methodologies and expectations from intellectual fields beyond the traditional, enclosed realms of rhetoric and aesthetics.
