New Criticism vs Practical CriticismRichards’s Cambridge experiment vs the American formalist school
Students mix these two up because they share a method — close reading — and a family tree. The clean way to hold them apart: Practical Criticism is a method born in Cambridge in the 1920s; New Criticism is a theory built on that method in America a decade later. Everything else follows from that one sentence.
The one-line answer
Practical Criticism = I.A. Richards, Cambridge, 1929 — an experiment in reading texts without context, studying how readers actually respond.
New Criticism = Ransom, Brooks, Tate, Wimsatt — America, 1941 — a doctrine that the text alone carries meaning, and both the author’s intention and the reader’s emotion are fallacies.
Side by side — the full comparison
| Dimension | Practical Criticism | New Criticism |
|---|---|---|
| Founder / key figure | I.A. Richards (with William Empson as his student) | John Crowe Ransom named it; Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Wimsatt & Beardsley developed it |
| Where and when | Cambridge, England — 1920s (Practical Criticism, 1929) | American South — 1930s–40s (The New Criticism, 1941) |
| What it is | A method and classroom experiment: analyse the poem in isolation, with no author name, no date, no context | A full critical theory: the poem is an autonomous, self-contained verbal object |
| Founding text | Practical Criticism (1929); Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) | The New Criticism (1941); The Well Wrought Urn (1947) |
| Focus of attention | The reader's actual responses — Richards studied his students' misreadings ('stock responses') | The text's internal structure — paradox, irony, tension, ambiguity, organic unity |
| Attitude to the reader | The reader's psychology matters; misreading is the object of study | The reader's feelings are irrelevant — the Affective Fallacy (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1949) |
| Attitude to the author | Context withheld as an experiment, not as doctrine | The author's intention is irrelevant in principle — the Intentional Fallacy (1946) |
| Legacy | Gave criticism its core classroom method: close reading | Turned close reading into a system that dominated American English departments until the 1960s |
The five dates UGC NET tests
Chronological-order questions on this topic recycle the same five texts. Learn them as one sequence:
Principles of Literary Criticism
I.A. Richards
Practical Criticism
I.A. Richards
The New Criticism (names the movement)
John Crowe Ransom
'The Intentional Fallacy'
Wimsatt & Beardsley
The Well Wrought Urn (Heresy of Paraphrase)
Cleanth Brooks
The confusion, untangled
Why do the two blur together? Because Ransom’s 1941 book that named New Criticism actually surveyed Richards himself (along with Empson and Eliot). So Richards is both the founder of Practical Criticism and a subject of the book that christened New Criticism — without ever being an American New Critic.
Hold onto this distinction
Richards cared about readers — his whole experiment was about how students misread. The New Critics ruled the reader out — the Affective Fallacy says a poem’s emotional effect on you is not its meaning. Same close-reading tools, opposite view of the reader.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between Practical Criticism and New Criticism?+
Practical Criticism (I.A. Richards, Cambridge, 1929) is a method — reading a text in isolation, without author or context, and studying how real readers respond. New Criticism (American, 1930s–40s) is a full theory built on that method — it treats the poem as an autonomous object and rules the author's intention (Intentional Fallacy) and the reader's emotions (Affective Fallacy) out of interpretation entirely.
Who coined the term 'New Criticism'?+
John Crowe Ransom, in his 1941 book The New Criticism, which surveyed the work of I.A. Richards, William Empson, T.S. Eliot, and Yvor Winters. The name stuck to the American formalist school that included Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and W.K. Wimsatt.
How is Practical Criticism connected to New Criticism?+
Practical Criticism is the parent. Richards's Cambridge experiment — giving students unsigned, undated poems and analysing their misreadings — established close reading as a discipline. The American New Critics adopted the close-reading method but converted it from a psychological experiment into a doctrine about the text itself: meaning lives in the words on the page, not in the author's mind or the reader's feelings.
How does UGC NET test the difference between Practical Criticism and New Criticism?+
Three recurring patterns: (1) matching questions pairing texts with critics — Practical Criticism with Richards, The New Criticism with Ransom, The Well Wrought Urn with Brooks; (2) chronology questions ordering 1924, 1929, 1941, 1946, 1947; (3) concept-attribution questions — knowing that stock responses belong to Richards while Intentional/Affective Fallacy belong to Wimsatt and Beardsley.
Related UGC NET Notes
New Criticism — Complete Notes
Intentional Fallacy, Affective Fallacy, Heresy of Paraphrase, MCQs
I.A. Richards — Practical Criticism
Stock responses, four kinds of meaning, tenor & vehicle
Seven Types of Ambiguity — Empson
Richards's student takes close reading to its limit
Literary Criticism — Unit VIII Hub
Plato to the present — the full criticism syllabus