Stylistics has long occupied a marginal yet persistent position in literary studies. Frequently presented as an auxiliary discipline—an applied linguistics that offers technical tools for textual analysis—it is often contrasted with “theory proper,” which is assumed to deal with ideology, subjectivity, history, and power at a higher conceptual level. This division is misleading. It rests […]

By the time Reader-Response Theory emerges in the mid-twentieth century, the Enlightenment foundations of literary meaning have already been profoundly unsettled. Marxism has displaced meaning from individual consciousness to material and ideological structures; psychoanalysis has fractured the subject internally through the logic of the unconscious; postcolonial theory has exposed the universal human subject as a

The emergence of psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coincides with a broader intellectual rupture in Western thought. Alongside Marxism, psychoanalysis constitutes one of the most sustained critiques of the Enlightenment conception of the human subject. Enlightenment humanism imagined the subject as rational, unified, self-present, and capable of transparent self-knowledge. Reason and

1. Introduction Modern literary theory can be read as a prolonged dismantling of the belief that literature expresses a timeless, universal human essence. What once appeared as the self-evident truth of “great literature”—that it speaks across cultures, histories, and societies—gradually becomes suspect under theoretical scrutiny. From Marxism onward, theory repeatedly exposes the mechanisms through which

Introduction: New Historicism as a Neo-Marxist Transformation New Historicism did not emerge in a theoretical vacuum, nor was it a sudden poststructuralist rupture with Marxism. On the contrary, its conceptual DNA is deeply marked by neo-Marxist revisions of classical Marxist thought—particularly those associated with Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. What New Historicism ultimately abandons is

Introduction Post-structuralism emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century as a critical response to structuralism, challenging its assumptions, methodologies, and claims about the universality and determinacy of structures. While structuralism, inspired by Saussure, posited that meaning arises from fixed relations within a system of differences, post-structuralist thought questioned whether such systems could ever

Introduction The twentieth century witnessed a profound transformation in literary theory and human understanding, often referred to as the linguistic turn, emerging from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and his linguistic insights. Structuralism reframed literature not as an autonomous creation of individual consciousness or as a reflection of social or psychic determinants, but as

Introduction Literary criticism, like literature itself, evolves alongside the cultural and intellectual currents of its time. From the classical musings of Plato and Aristotle to the moral and aesthetic guidance of early modern critics, the field has always grappled with questions of value, meaning, and truth. Traditional criticism, broadly speaking, presumes the existence of an