Literary Theory Hub: All 30 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.

Queer theory grew directly out of feminist theory — Butler's performativity extends and radicalises feminist debates about gender construction. But queer theory also critiques feminism for assuming a stable 'woman' as its subject.

Foucault's argument that sexuality is a discursive construction (not a natural fact) is the philosophical basis of queer theory. Butler's performativity applies Derridean citation theory to gender. Queer theory is poststructuralism applied to sex and sexuality.

Sedgwick and Butler both engage and challenge psychoanalysis — using Lacan's theory of desire while refusing psychoanalysis's heteronormative assumptions about development, gender, and the 'normal' subject.

Postcolonial queer theory (Muñoz, Puar's 'homonationalism') shows how heteronormativity and colonial power reinforce each other — and how Western LGBTQ+ politics can itself become a tool of imperial critique of the non-West.

Foucault's concepts of discourse, power/knowledge, and the episteme gave New Historicism its core theoretical tools. Greenblatt uses Foucault to show how power operates through cultural practices — theatre, religious ritual, legal proceedings — in the Renaissance.

Both read texts in relation to power and historical context. But Postcolonialism centres race and colonial history as its specific axis. Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions applies New Historicist method to the colonial encounter, making the two approaches increasingly convergent in postcolonial historicism.

Both see ideology as shaping literary texts. Cultural Materialism — the British variant of New Historicism (Dollimore, Sinfield) — extends Marxism's materialist critique while challenging Greenblatt's 'containment' model: where Greenblatt sees power absorbing all subversion, Sinfield's 'faultlines' insist that genuine resistance is always possible.