Meanings
- A movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle of the 20th century, emphasizing close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work functions as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.
One could argue that it is precisely this lack of self-awareness or self-reflexivity that so easily renders environmentalists the butt of jokes, that makes them "vulnerable," to use that language of New Criticism.
2018, Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism, page 141 more example
It is not just these works that are to be explicated as texts, it is the workings of a political and literary culture that can strengthen the present. For this point of view, Matthiessen was attacked. In the heyday of formalist New Criticism, itself a way of going about the study of literature that could only serve the interests of depoliticizing public culture, any wider interests in the interrelation of the work to society and times and the most fundamental provisions of the history of ideas are all to be expunged.
1983 August 13, Denis M. Sweet, “A Scholar For Our Democracy”, in Gay Community News, volume 11, number 5, page 13
Translations
Chinese Mandarin 新批評 /新批评
- 新批評 /新批评 (Xīn Pīpíng)Translations
Cite this entry
New Criticism. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/New%20Criticism
“New Criticism.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/New%20Criticism. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “New Criticism,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/New%20Criticism.
Source: New Criticism on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.