Read this and summarize it for me. Also, focus on these 6 subjects and give a quiz about them:
1-Introduction to literary theory 
2-Moral criticism 
3-Formalism 
4-Psychoanalytic criticism 
5-Feminism 
6-Post colonialism 

New Criticism/Formalism ,(1930s-present)
New Criticism, also known as [Formalism], is a method of literary evaluation and interpretation practiced mainly in the mid-20th century; it emphasizes close examination of a text with minimum regard for the biographical or historical circumstances in which this text was produced. The name New Criticism was coined by John Crowe Ransom, who describes the new American formalists in his book The New Criticism in 1941 as New Critics, which gave the movement its name.
New Criticism was a reaction against the elegant cultivation of taste and sentiment that marked the late nineteenth and early twentieth century criticism. The contribution of New Criticism to literary works is regarded as a form of criticism that took the place of the biographical-historical criticism which dominated literary studies in the nineteenth, and the early decades of the twentieth century. In effect, before the rising of New Criticism, it was common practice to interpret a literary text by studying other elements associated with the text, such as the author’s life, political events, and times, to determine the meaning that the author intended the text to have. The author’s letters, his journals of experiences and observations, and the circumstances that shaped his life were taken as evidences of authorial intention as they were autobiographies, biographies, and history books. However, in its extreme form, the biographical-historical criticism seemed to examine the text’s biographical-historical context instead of examining the text.”
The New Critics attempted to avoid impressionistic criticism, which is the immediate and intuitive response to judgment of literary work determined by the reader’s personality and past experiences. New Critics also wanted to avoid social/ historical approaches which might easily be repressed by some cultural or political restraints. Therefore, New Criticism attempted to arrange the study of literature according to a particular system that emphasized a strict study of the text itself.
The Method of New Criticism
The method of New Criticism stresses on close reading while
concentrating on such formal aspects as rhythm, meter, theme, imagery, metaphor. The interpretation of a text shows that these aspects serve to support the structure of meaning within the text. It emphasizes close attention to the features from inside the text itself, and it discourages the use of external evidence to explain the work. Following is a brief description of the main methods of New Criticism:
1. Close reading
Close reading is meant to emphasize the authentic literary
elements of the text; it does not concern itself with the kinds of emotions and thoughts this text provokes but rather it studies the literary composition of the text. This literary composition is said to make each text unique and different. The New Criticism suggests that every text is autonomous while history, biography, sociology, psychology, author’s

intention and reader’s private experience are all irrelevant. This close reading has become the essence of New Criticism, for many critics in North America and Britain, it became not a method of criticism, but criticism itself.
The New Critics gave special advantages to poetry over other forms of literary genre because they saw the poem as the clear exemplification of the literary values that they support. In other words, poetry conveyed the “literary pillars” in a condensed fashion; these include metaphors, imagery, rhythm, meter, and theme. However, the techniques of close reading and structural analysis of texts have also been applied to fiction, drama, film and other literary forms. These techniques seem to remain the dominant critical approach in many modern literature works.
2. The Intentional and Affective Fallacies
According to New Criticism, any attempt to look at the author’s
relationship to a work is called the intentional fallacy. Any attempt to look at the reader’s individual response is called the affective fallacy. While the intentional fallacy confuses the text with its origins, the affective fallacy confuses the text with its affects, that is, with the sentiments it produces. They believe that the affective fallacy leads to impressionistic responses; for instance, if a reader doesn’t like a character, then that character must be evil or bad and hence producing a relative text which means whatever any reader thinks it means. The result of these practices is confusion “we have no standards for interpreting or evaluating literature.
New Critics believe that one can know if a given author’s intention or a given reader’s interpretation actually represents the text’s meaning is to examine or all the evidences provided by the language of the text itself, such as the images, symbols, metaphors, rhyme, meter, point of view, setting, characterization, plot, and so forth, which called formal elements. In fact, New Criticism mentions the author’s intention and the reader’s response in critical readings of literary texts, but “neither one is the focus of analysis”.
3. The Text itself:
For New Critics, the text itself became the main point to focus the attention on the literary work as the only source of evidence for interpreting it. Thus, New Critics see the life and times of the author and the mood of the age, in which he or she lived, are the focus of the literary historian not of the literary critics. In addition, they pointed out that confident knowledge of the author’s intended meaning is usually hard to attain. Even if it is available, all what someone can know is what the author wanted to accomplish, not what he or she accomplished. To add to this complication, sometimes a literary text does not live up to the author’s intention; and occasionally, it is even more meaningful, rich, and complex than the author realized. Thus, knowing an author’s intention tells almost nothing about the text, so that New Critics coined the term “intentional fallacy” to refer to the mistaken belief that the author’s intention is the same as the meaning of the text. Moreover, the author’s intention does not help determine the reader’s personal

response, either, since authors can write for different reasons, but readers presume meaning as they find it fits.
4. Central Unity
New Criticism argues that each text has a central unity. The responsibility of the reader is to discover this unity. In other word, the reader’s job is to interpret the text, telling in what ways each of its parts contributes to the central unity. Also, the primary interest is in themes. A text is spoken by a persona (narrator or speaker), who expresses an attitude, which must be defined and, who speaks in a tone which helps defining the attitude, such as ironic, mockery, sincere, straightforward or ambiguous. Judgments of the value of a text must be based on the richness of the attitude and the complexity and the balance of the text. The key phrases are ambivalence, ambiguity, tension, irony and paradox.
The reader’s analysis of these elements leads to an examination of the themes. A work is said to be good or bad depending on whether the themes are complex and whether or not they contribute to the central, unifying theme. They conceder that, “the more complex the themes are, and the more closely they contribute to a central theme (unity), the better the work.” The words must be comprehended to be ambiguous. “The more possible meanings a word has, the richer the ambiguity.” The reader should look for irony, ambiguous and paradox, and the reader must discover tensions in the work that they review. These will be the results of thematic oppositions, though they may also occur as oppositions in imagery such as white versus black, sky versus earth, light versus dark, good versus evil, beautiful versus ugly and so forth.
In general, the New Critics define their themes as oppositions: life and death, good and evil, love and hate, harmony and strife, order and disorder, eternity and time, truth and falsehood, emotion and reason, simplicity and complexity, nature and art, and so on. The analysis of a text is an exercise in showing how all of its parts contribute to a complex but single unified statement about human’s problems.
5. The Heresy of Paraphrase
For New Criticism, a literary work is a timeless, autonomous (self-
sufficient) verbal object. Readers and readings may change, but the literary text remains the same. Its meaning is as objective for it is constructed of words placed in a specific relationship to one another (specific words placed in a specific order like the way some of new poetry is), and this is one sort of relationship that creates a complex meaning that cannot be reproduced by any other combination of words. This is why New Criticism asserted that the meaning of a poem could not be explained simply by paraphrasing it, or translating it into everyday language, a practice of New Critics referrers to as the heresy of paraphrase. They argue that changing a line, an image, a punctuation, a word of the poem, or even changing the order of the lines, will have a different poem. Although the New Critics do not assert that the meaning of a poem is unimportant, they reject approaches which view the poem as an attempt to represent the “real world.” They justify the avoidance of discussion of a poem’s content through the doctrine of the heresy of

paraphrase, which Cleanth Brooks, American teacher and critic, described in his book The Well-Wrought Urn that the meaning of a poem is complex and precise, and that any attempt to paraphrase it inevitably distorts or reduces it. Thus, any attempt to say what a poem means is heretical, because “it is an insult to the integrity of the complex structure of meaning within the work.” Moreover, linking this to the New Critic’s main thought of close reading, when one paraphrase into his/her own thoughts and experiencing and thus diverging from the actual body of the text that is made to be unique and different because through the use of ironic contrast and ambivalence, the poet creates internal paradoxes that are authentic by their nature of creation. In addition, during the period of authority of close New Critical analysis, the poem is shown to be a hierarchical structure of meaning, of which one correct reading can be given to show the aesthetic marks in the text. Thus, New Criticism though stresses on internal structure, it is not impossible to notice the beauty of textual work that they see coming from its inside.
New Criticism and Formalism
The New Critics clearly comes close to the Formalists in the importance
that they attach to the ideas of structure and interrelatedness. New critics even occasionally called themselves formalists , and in their insistence on the objective character of criticism and the distinction of the author and the reader from the text. Yet, their notion of structure is narrower than that of the Formalism, which included all the different levels of the text and not just its meaning; and they were not much interested in the ideas of difference, defamiliarization or deviance to which the Formalists attached. It is obvious that New Criticism incorporating Formalism and examines the relationships between a text’s ideas and its form. In other word, they examine what the text says and the way it says it. New Critics “may find tension, irony, or paradox in this relation, but they usually resolve it into unity and coherence of meaning.” New Criticism like Formalism attempts to be a science of literature, objective, or disinterested. Because of that they focus on the technical vocabulary and work with patterns of sound, imagery, narrative structure, point of view, and other techniques discernible on close reading of the text, they seek to determine the function and appropriateness of these to the self-contained work. The New Critics emphasized was convergence within the text rather than deviation from an external standard. As a result they were far less interested in literary innovation than the Formalists tended to be. Another important difference between the New Critics and the Formalists and structuralists concerns their conception of meaning, a conception which is crucial to their insistence on the objective character of criticism.
Possible Critiques and Responses
Since New Criticism is such a structured program for the study of
literature, it opens to criticism on many fronts. First, in its insistence on excluding external evidence, New Criticism denies many possibly useful

perspectives for understanding texts, such as historicism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. Because New Criticism aim is to find one “correct” reading, it also ignores in somehow the ambiguity of language and the active nature of the perception of meaning described by poststructuralists. Eventually, it can even be perceived as elitist, because it excludes those readers who lack the background for arriving at the “correct” interpretation. However, defenders of New Criticism argue that this approach is meant to deal with the poem on its own terms. While New Criticism may not offer a wide range of perspectives on texts, it does attempt to deal with the text as only a work of literary art.
An important factor in the reputation of New Criticism as a movement is that “it was especially in the period just before and after World War II, a phenomenon of periodical journals, such as the Southern Review, the Sewanee Review, and the Kenyon Review together with Leavis’s Scrutiny in England.” While the variations are as rich as the literature examined, the New Critical essay is generally characterized by a close attention to the language of the text, to show a pattern of formal and thematic features that the critic commonly argues are fundamental to understanding the meaning of the work as a whole but that are expressed in terms that foreground the formal unity or balance of the work.
Among the best-known figures associated with the New Criticism are T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis , I. A. Richards, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and others.
New Criticism/Formalism From a Bird’s-eye View Formalistic approach, once called New Criticism, involves a close reading of the text. Formalistic critics believe that all info essential to the interpretation of a work must be found within the work itself; there's no need to bring in outside info about the history, politics, or society of the time. Formalistic critics spend much time analyzing irony, paradox, imagery, and metaphor. They are also interested in the work's setting, characters, symbols, and point of view.
Formalism/New Criticism Advantages
This approach can be performed without much research, and it emphasizes the value of literature apart from its context (in effect makes literature timeless). Virtually all critical approaches must begin here.
Formalism/New Criticism Disadvantages:
The text is seen in isolation. Formalism ignores the context of the work. It cannot account for allusions. It tends to reduce literature to little more than a collection of rhetorical devices.


Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)
Feminism is an attempt by women to universally liberate itself from male chauvinism and patriarchy. This iconoclastic and radical approach pursues the ambition of helping women gain equality with men. This radical posture of Feminist criticism is reflected in its dissatisfaction with the place of women in global social and cultural situations.
Feminist literary critic’s pursues the cause of women in literary texts by men, and in novels, plays and poems written by female authors. Furthermore, Feminist literary writers feature women characters and ideas dominant in their works. Those writers endeavour to propagate Feminist thought, female concerns, ideas and accomplishments, and to recover the largely unrecorded and unknown history of women in earlier times. among prominent Feminist critics are Virjinia Woolf and Betty Raynolds.
The concept of Feminism, in general, has been concerned with the analysis of the trend of male domination in the society; the general attitude of male towards female; the exploitation and discrimination faced by females; the need for improving the condition of women; and, so on. In literature, this movement has concentrated on the role played by literature to support gender discrimination as well as to oppose it; the reasons for lesser significance of the contribution by female writers in the literary tradition than that of the male writers; the difference in the ways in which works of male writers and female writers, respectively, have represented gender discrimination; andthe ways in which social conditions and literary traditions regarding gender discrimination have affected one another. The concept received proper identification in the literary field during 1960s. Before that, feminism was limited to the authorship of female writers and the representation given to women in literature with the help of female characters. The condition of women in society, in general, gained expression through the situations, fictional female characters experienced, and their responses to it.
The adoption of the concept by authors and critics in a formal manner led to the study of all the aspects of human life; social, cultural, educational, professional and financial, with an intent to expose the intentional and unintentional

efforts of the society to maintain or intensify the effects of patriarchal superiority.
Feminist criticism has, in many ways, followed what some theorists call the three waves of feminism:
1. First Wave Feminism - late 1700s-early 1900's: writers like Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792) highlights the inequalities between the sexes. Activists like Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull contribute to the women's suffrage movement, which leads to National Universal Suffrage in 1920 with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment.
2. Second Wave Feminism - early 1960s-late 1970s: refers to a period of feminist thought that originated around the 1960s and was mainly concerned with independence and greater political action to improve women's rights. It is also known as Gynocriticism’. This stage is believed to have begun with Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own published in 1970. it introduced a direct analysis of the relation between female and literature. During this phase, female writers and Female characters were studied with an approach to understanding the difference between the treatment of female characters by male and female writers, respectively. The most important aspect of this phase is the attempt to understand the evolution of the female literary tradition. Writers like Simone de Beauvoir (Le deuxième sexe, 1972) and Elaine Showalter established the groundwork for the dissemination of feminist theories, dove-tailed with the American Civil Rights movement.
3. Third Wave Feminism - early 1990s-present: resisting the perceived essentialist (over generalized, over simplified) ideologies and a white, heterosexual, middle class focus of second wave feminism. third wave feminism borrows from contemporary gender and race theories to expand on marginalized populations' experiences. Writers like Alice Walker work to reconcile feminism with the concerns of the black community and the survival and wholeness of her people, men and women both, and for the promotion of dialog and community, as well as for the valorization of women and of all the varieties of work women perform.
As a form of sociological criticism, feminist criticism, in general, shares some qualities with Marxist approaches.: both

are critical of society, as it is presently constituted: both are concerned with the lives of those oppressed or marginalized by the dominant culture: both investigate literature as a means of bringing about changes in attitudes and ultimately in society. Because of its interest in social issues, Feminism, like Marxism, is historical, political as it proposes a dynamic ideological commitment.
Feminist Approach Advantages: Women have been somewhat underrepresented in the traditional cannon, and a feminist approach to literature addresses this problem.
Feminist Approach Disadvantages: Can turn literary criticism into a political battlefield. Can overlook the merits of works they consider "patriarchal".
Key Terms:
Androgyny: a world in which sex-roles are not rigidly defined, a state in which the man in every woman and the woman in every man could be integrated and freely expressed. Used more frequently in the 1970's, this term was used to describe a blurring, or combination of gender roles so that neither masculinity or femininity is dominant.
Backlash: a term, which may have originated with Susan Faludi, referring to a movement in 1980s away from or against feminism.
Écriture féminine: literally women's writing, is a philosophy that promotes women's experiences and feelings to the point that it strengthens the work. Hélène Cixous first used this term in her essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in which she asserts, "Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies. Écriture féminine places experience before language.
Essentialism: The belief in a uniquely feminine essence, existing above and beyond cultural conditioning the mirror image of biologism which for centuries justified the oppression of women by proclaiming the natural superiority of men. Gynocentrics: "a term coined by the feminist scholar-critic Elaine Showalter to define the process of constructing "a female framework for analysis of women's literature [in order] to develop new models [of interpretation] based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt to male models and theories.

Patriarchy: "Sexism is perpetuated by systems of patriarchy where male-dominated structures and social arrangements elaborate the oppression of women. Patriarchy almost by definition also exhibits androcentrism, meaning male centered. Coupled with patriarchy, androcentrism assumes that male norms operate through out all social institutions and become the standard to which all persons adhere.
Feminist Criticism from a Bird's Eye View
Feminist criticism examines the social relationships in a literary work, an author’s life, or the context of a work in terms of the patriarchal social forces in the culture. In feminist criticism, attitudes toward women, the pressures on female characters, and the image of women the work presents, are all relevant critical issues. This approach also examines power relationships of institutions which treat men and women differently.

Psychoanalytic Literary Theory (1930s-present)

Sigmund Freud’s, (1856-1939), writings on the unconscious mind
 were a defining moment for art and literature. The Interpretation of
  Dreams (1899) deals with psychological complexity, The notion that dreams allow such psychic explorations, of course, like the analogy
between literary works and dreams, owes a great deal to the thinking of Sigmund Freud, the famous Austrian psychoanalyst, and later theorists to interpret texts. This seminal essay, The Interpretation of Dreams, argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses [mental or emotional disorders]. It seems "natural" to think of literary works in terms of dreams. We are all Freudians, really, whether or not we have read anything by Freud. At one time or another, most of us have referred to ego, libido, complexes, unconscious desires, and sexual repression. The premises of Freud's thought have changed the way the Western world thinks about itself. To a lesser extent, we are all psychoanalytic interpreters as well.
One may psychoanalyze a particular character within a literary work, but it is usually assumed that all such characters are projections of the author's psyche. One interesting facet of this approach is that it validates the importance of literature, as it is built on a literary key for the decoding. Freud himself wrote, "The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech."
Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, and so forth within what may well be a disunified literary work. The author's own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such will be traceable within the behavior of the characters in the literary work. But psychological material will be expressed indirectly, disguised, or encoded (as in dreams) through principles such as "symbolism" (the repressed object represented in disguise), "condensation" (several thoughts or persons represented in a single image), and "displacement" (anxiety located onto another image by means of association).
Freud's theories are either directly or indirectly concerned with the nature of the unconscious mind. Freud suggested that the powers motivating men and women are mainly and normally unconscious. He argues that the human mind is essentially dual in nature. He called the predominantly passional, irrational, unknown, and unconscious part of the psyche the id, or "it." The ego or "I," was his term for the predominantly rational, logical, orderly, conscious part. Another aspect of the psyche, which he called the superego, is really a projection of the ego. The superego
 Sigmund Freud’s, (1856-1939), writings on the unconscious mind
 were a defining moment for art and literature. The Interpretation of
  Dreams (1899) deals with psychological complexity,
  
almost seems to be outside of the self, making moral judgments, telling us to make sacrifices for good causes even though self-sacrifice may not be quite logical or rational. And, in a sense, the superego is "outside," since much of what it tells us to do or think we have learned from our parents, our schools, or our religious institutions.
What the ego and superego tell us not to do or think is repressed, forced into the unconscious mind. One of Freud's most important contributions to the study of the psyche, the theory of repression, goes something like this: much of what lies in the unconscious mind has been put there by consciousness, which acts as a censor, driving underground unconscious or conscious thoughts or instincts that it deems unacceptable. Censored materials often involve infantile sexual desires, Freud postulated. Repressed to an unconscious state, they emerge only in disguised forms: in dreams, in language (so-called Freudian slips), in creative activity that may produce art (including literature), and in neurotic behavior. According to Freud, all of us have repressed wishes and fears. One of the unconscious desires most commonly repressed is the childhood wish to displace the parent of our own sex and take his or her place in the affections of the parent of the opposite sex. This desire really involves a number of different but related wishes and fears. (A boy- -and it should be remarked in passing that Freud here concerns himself mainly with the male--may fear that his father will castrate him, and he may wish that his mother would return to nursing him.) Freud referred to the whole complex of feelings by the word "oedipal," naming the complex after the Greek tragic hero Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother.
The psychoanalytic approach to literature not only rests on the theories of Freud; it may even be said to have begun with Freud, who was interested in writers, especially those who relied heavily on symbols. Such writers regularly cloak or mystify ideas in figures that make sense only when interpreted, much as the unconscious mind of a neurotic disguises secret thoughts in dream stories or bizarre actions that need to be interpreted by an analyst.
A later generation of psychoanalytic critics often paused to analyze the characters in novels and plays before proceeding to their authors. But not for long, since characters, both evil and good, tended to be seen by these critics as the author's potential selves, or projections of various repressed aspects of his or her psyche. In the view of critics attempting to arrive at more psychological insights into an author than biographical materials can provide, a work of literature is a fantasy or a dream--or at least so analogous to daydream or dream that Freudian analysis can help explain the nature of the mind that produced it. The author's purpose in writing is to gratify secretly some forbidden wish, in particular an infantile wish or desire that has been repressed into the unconscious mind. To discover what the wish is, the psychoanalytic critic employs many of the terms and procedures developed by Freud to analyze dreams.

Despite the importance of the author here, psychoanalytic criticism is similar to New Criticism in not concerning itself with "what the author intended." But what the author never intended (that is, repressed) is sought. The unconscious material has been distorted by the censoring conscious mind.
Psychological Approach Advantages: It can be a useful tool for understanding works in which characters obviously have psychological issues. Like the biographical approach, knowing something about a writer's psychological make up can give us insight into his work. Psychological Approach Disadvantages: It can turn a work into little more than a psychological as study, neglecting to view it as a piece of art. Critics sometimes attempt to diagnose long dead authors based on their works, which is perhaps not the best evidence of their psychology. Critics tend to see sex in everything, exaggerating this aspect of literature.
major figures: Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Jacques Lacan, Shoshona Felman, Jane Gallop, Norman Holland, George Klein, Elizabeth Wright, Frederick Hoffman, and Simon Lesser.
Key Terms:
Unconscious: the irrational part of the psyche unavailable to a person's consciousness except through dissociated acts or dreams.
Freud's model of the psyche:
Id: completely unconscious part of the psyche that serves
as a storehouse of our desires, wishes, and fears.
Ego: mostly the parcial conscious part of the psyche that processes experiences and operates as a referee or mediator between the id and superego.
Superego: often thought of as one's conscience; the superego operates like an internal censor encouraging moral judgments in light of social pressures.
Psychological Criticism from a Bird's Eye View
Psychological approaches to literary criticism use the theories of Sigmund Freud to explore the motivations of characters and the symbolic meanings of events. Psychological Criticism focuses on a work of literature primarily as an expression, in fictional form, of the state of mind and the structure of personality of the individual author. In other words, a literary text is related to its author’s mental and emotional traits. In addition, a literary work is an expression of the conscious and unconscious needs, desires, ambitions, frustrations, and resentments of the author. 

Post-Colonial Literary Theory (1970s-present)
“History is Written by the Victors”
Postcolonial theory is a literary theory or critical approach that deals with literature produced in countries that were once, or are now, colonies

of other countries. Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion, and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial hegemony, for example, (western colonizers controlling the colonized). It may also deal with literature written in or by citizens of colonizing countries that takes colonies or their peoples as its subject matter. The theory is based around concepts of otherness and resistance.
Postcolonial theory became part of the literary trends in the 1970s, and many practitioners credit Edward Said’s book Orientalism as being the founding work. Typically, the proponents of the theory examine the ways in which writers from colonized countries attempt to articulate and even celebrate their cultural identities and reclaim them from the colonizers. They also examine ways in which the literature of the colonial powers is used to justify colonialism through the perpetuation of images of the colonized as inferior. However, attempts at coming up with a single definition of postcolonial theory have proved controversial, and some writers have strongly critiqued the whole concept.
Post-colonial theory deals with the reading and writing of literature written in previously or currently colonized countries, or literature written in colonizing countries which deals with colonization or colonized peoples. It focuses particularly on the way in which literature by the colonizing culture distorts the experience and realities, and inscribes the inferiority, of the colonized people on literature by colonized peoples which attempts to articulate their identity and reclaim their past in the face of that past's inevitable otherness. It can also deal with the way in which literature in colonizing countries appropriates the language, images, scenes, traditions and so forth of colonized countries.
The main source of inspiration for this line of analysis is the powerful and controversial study of Edward W. Said Orientalism (1978). Edward Said, a pioneer of postcolonial criticism and studies, focused on the way in which the colonizing First World has invented false images and myths of the Third (postcolonial) world, stereotypical images and myths that have conveniently justified Western exploitation and domination of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures and peoples. Said charged that European and Euro-American scholars and other experts had systematically misrepresented Muslim peoples and societies by characterizing them as irrational, stagnant, exotic, effeminate, and mired in tradition. This characterization derived not from objective observation, Said argued, but rather from a rhetorical tactic: European and Euro- American experts misrepresented Muslim peoples and societies in order to distinguish themselves from the foreigner and characterize themselves as rational, dynamic, masculine, and thoroughly modern. Although Said concentrated on misrepresentations of Muslim peoples in Orientalism, the book's critical analysis suggested new ways of thinking about characterizations of African, Asian, American, and Oceanic lands in European and Euro-American travel accounts. Yet, Orientalism helped inspire a distinctive literary analysis of culture and criticism.

In his essay "Postcolonial Criticism" (1992), Homi K. Bhabha has shown how certain cultures (mis)represent other cultures, thereby extending their political and social domination in the modern world order.
Again, a post-colonial critic might be interested in works such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, where colonial "ideology is manifested in Crusoe's colonialist attitude toward the land upon which he's shipwrecked, and toward the black man he 'colonizes' and names Friday. Post-colonial criticism also takes the form of literature composed by authors that critique Euro-centric hegemony.
Seminal post-colonial writers such as Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has written a number of stories recounting the suffering of colonized people. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe details the strife and devastation that occurred when British colonists began moving inland from the Nigerian coast. Rather than glorifying the exploratory nature of European colonists as they expanded their sphere of influence, Achebe narrates the destructive events that led to the death and enslavement of thousands of Nigerians when the British imposed their Imperial government. In turn, Achebe points out the negative effects and shifting ideas of identity and culture caused by the imposition of western religion and economics on Nigerians during colonial rule.
Power, Hegemony, and Literature
Post-colonial criticism also questions the role of the western literary canon and western history as dominant forms of knowledge making. The terms "first-world," "second world," "third world" and "fourth world" nations are critiqued by post-colonial critics, because they reinforce the dominant positions of western cultures populating first world status. This critique includes the literary canon and histories written from the perspective of first-world cultures. So, for example, a post-colonial critic might question the works included in the canon, because the canon does not contain works by authors outside western culture.
Moreover, the authors included in the canon often reinforce colonial hegemonic ideology, such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Western critics might consider Heart of Darkness an effective critique of colonial behavior. But post-colonial theorists and authors might disagree with this perspective. As Chinua Achebe notes, the novel portrays Africans as a pre-historic mass of frenzied, howling, incomprehensible barbarians.
Key Terms:
Alterity: lack of identification with some part of one's personality or one's community, differentness, otherness.
Diaspora: is used (without capitalization) to refer to any people or ethnic population forced or induced to leave their traditional ethnic homelands, being dispersed throughout other parts of the world, and the ensuing developments in their dispersal and culture.

Eurocentrism: the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing emphasis on European and, generally, Western concerns, culture and values at the expense of those of other cultures. It is an instance of ethnocentrism. Hybridity: the integration or mingling of cultural signs and practices from the colonizing and the colonized cultures. The assimilation and adaptation of cultural practices, the cross-fertilization of cultures, can be seen as positive, enriching, and dynamic, as well as oppressive.
Imperialism: the policy of extending the control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires, either through direct territorial control or through indirect methods of exerting control on the politics and/or economy of other countries.
Major figures of this school include Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid, and Buchi Emecheta.
Post-Colonial Theory from a Bird's Eye View
Post-colonial theory examines the origins, effects, and both immediate and long-term, political, cultural, and social results of Europe (as well as America’s) colonialization of different cultures and regions of the world through the study of various literary texts which depict, sometimes celebrate, and critique and disparage the act of colonialization. Post- colonial theory questions and examines the expansionist imperialism of colonializing nations and cultures and the set of political, social, and cultural values. Post-colonial theorists tend to focus their theoretical examination on texts from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.