Literary Theory Hub: All 10 Theories

Both focus on the text, but Structuralism asks about the underlying system of language, not just the individual poem.

Derrida showed that the 'stable structures' Structuralism found are always undone from within — meaning is never fixed.

Postcolonialism accepted Marxism's attention to power and economics but added race and colonial history as independent axes of oppression.

Both ask who has power and who is silenced — but Feminist Theory insists that gender is not reducible to class.

Lacan rewrote Freud through Saussure — the unconscious is structured like a language, making psychoanalysis and linguistics inseparable.

Both reject the idea that meaning is fixed in the text — but Reader-Response locates meaning in the reader, while Poststructuralism says meaning is endlessly deferred.

Archetypal Criticism claims universal human patterns; Postcolonialism insists those 'universals' are often Eurocentric impositions on other cultures.

Postcolonial ecocriticism shows that colonial extraction was simultaneously ecological — the clearing of forests, damming of rivers, and introduction of monocultures. Climate change is itself a postcolonial injustice.

Ecofeminism (Val Plumwood) argues that the domination of nature and the domination of women arise from the same dualistic logic — feminist politics and environmental politics are inseparable.

Timothy Morton's dark ecology applies Derridean deconstruction to the concept of 'Nature' itself — arguing that the romanticised 'Nature' of pastoral tradition is itself a cultural construction that prevents genuine ecological thinking.