NEW CRITICISM
New criticism is the name of a movement in literary criticism which developed in 1910 in the United States of America and extended to Britain as well in the 1920s and 1930s.The publication of John Crowe Ransom's book , The New Criticism , in 1941 is considered to be the starting point of New Criticism as a critical approach. It was a shift from the old (traditional) criticism , hence the name New Criticism. Old(traditional) criticism focused entirely on the biography and psychology of the writer ,his background and the historical situation, when the text was written. The New Critics advocated a method based on close reading of the text alone and detailed textual analysis of the text and ignored all extraneous factors such as the mind and personality of the writer. It sought to move away from the traditional critical approaches based on biography, intentions of the author and social impact, and shifted the focus away from the author and contexts, to the formal aspects...