Thematic literary criticism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Thematic literary criticism is the study of literature categorized or classified by theme. Examples include Mario Praz’s Romantic Agony, which investigates the morbid and sexual tendencies in Romantic literature, Todorov The Fantastic, which is a survey of fantastic strains in European literature, Colin Wilson's The Misfits and The Outsider which highlites authors considered perverse or out of the mainstream respectively, Ludwig Marcuse’s Obscene, a survey of obscenity trials in European literature, André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor, a compendium of authors considered practitioners of black humor and Patrick J. Kearney's A History of Erotic Literature which is a history of erotic fiction.
An early theoretic approach to thematic criticism is provided by Jean-Pierre Richard in Littérature et Sensation (1954) and Horst Daemmrich's Themes and Motifs in Western Literature.
Themes
- Fantasy tropes and conventions
- Science fiction
- Adultery in literature
- Addiction to literature
- Sex in literature
- Suicide in literature
- Transgressive fiction
- Cannibalism in fiction
- Psychoanalytic literary criticism
- Prostitution in art and literature
- Mental disorders in art and literature
- Synesthesia in literature
List of examples
- Praz’s Romantic Agony
- Todorov’s The Fantastic
- Colin Wilson’s The Misfits and The Outsider
- Ludwig Marcuse’s Obscene
- André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor
- Patrick J. Kearney's A History of Erotic Literature
See also
- Archetypal literary criticism
- The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations
- Literary criticism
- Genre theory
- Literary theory
- Motif-Index of Folk-Literature
- Morphology (folkloristics)
- Narratology
- Trope (literature)
- Theme (art)
