Typology of Literary Theories

Modern literary criticism approaches are theory-oriented actions. They mainly include interdisciplinary theories. The theories and critical approaches can be classified according to some criteria. This analytical-descriptive research aims to collect and evaluate the classification models of literary theories. At first, ‘academic criticism’ was re-identified from ‘journalistic criticism’. Then, it has been shown that according to which indicators literary theories have been classified so far, which of the types are from the other types, and which of the other species is more effective. The findings indicate that in one of the models, the typology of literary theories is based on what questions these theories aim to answer. Another proposed model for the typology of literary theories is Abrams' model. In this model, literary theories depend on four factors of artist, audience, world, and text. They are also divided into four types of simulation theories, pragmatic theories, statistical theories, and objective theories. The most complete model is Jacobsen-Selden and Widdowson's model. In this model, after removing the ‘communication channel’, five factors are effective in the process of literary criticism. The maximum attention to each of these factors differentiates a type of literary criticism approaches from other types: Author-centered literary criticism (romantic literary criticism and psychological criticism), reader-centered literary criticism (phenomenological criticism and perception theory), text-centered literary criticism (Russian formalism and new criticism), subject-centered literary criticism (criticism Marxist and modern historicism), and cryptographic literary criticism (structuralism and post-structuralism).