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Jinghua Lin

Abstract

The event of the publication of René Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (1949) signals that European literary criticism was transformed rapidly into literary theory by American scholars. To be more specific, from then on, British New Criticism that emphasized close reading was replaced by American New Criticism that valorized analysis of semantic structure, and Russian formalism was rediscovered and reactivated in this process. Afterwards, more theoretical schools sprang up, such as semiotics, structuralism, hermeneutics, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, and so on. And along with the scientific literary theory, many other theories, like Western Marxist criticism, feminism, gender studies, new historicism, postcolonial criticism, and cultural studies in European and American academia, came out and flourished during the Cold War. At that time, the Soviet Union had established and reinforced a set of Communist theory. And in response to its reflection theory, U.S.-led "Western countries" turned "literary criticism" based on critics' individual experience into "literary theory" as a discipline with a curriculum system. Therefore, the discipline of literary theory, whose blossom was a result of the Cold War, and specific literary theory, unaffiliated with ideology of the war, were constantly in conflict with each other. And there was much controversy about literary criticism during the Cold War. But as the war ended with the upheaval of Eastern Europe and collapse of the Soviet Union, the theory of reflection failed, and Western literary theory, like "the end of history" theory, finally became legitimate in the process of globalization. It is a major concern for western theorists to develop the disputed theory in recent 40 years, but post-theories' dimension of international politics could not be ignored.

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