Title: 
Headings: 

Content: the biographical critic “focuses on explicating the literary work
by using the insight provided by knowledge of the author’s life.... [B]iographical data should amplify the meaning of the text, not drown it out
with irrelevant material.” Historical Criticism: This approach “seeks to
understand a
literary work by investigating the social, cultural, and intellectual context
that produced it—a context that necessarily includes the artist’s
biography and milieu.” A key goal for historical critics is to understand
the
effect of a literary work upon its original readers. Gender Criticism: This approach “examines how sexual
identity influences the creation and reception of literary works.” Originally
an offshoot of feminist movements, gender criticism today includes a number of
approaches, including the so-called “masculinist” approach recently
advocated
by poet Robert Bly. The bulk of gender criticism, however, is feminist and
takes as a central precept that the patriarchal attitudes that have dominated
western thought have resulted, consciously or unconsciously, in literature
“full of unexamined ‘male-produced’ assumptions.” Feminist
criticism attempts
to correct this imbalance by analyzing and combatting such attitudes—by
questioning, for example, why none of the characters in Shakespeare’s play
Othelloever challenge the right of a husband to murder a wife accused
of adultery. Other goals of feminist critics include “analyzing how sexual
identity influences the reader of a text” and “examin[ing] how the
images of
men and women in imaginative literature reflect or reject the social forces
that have historically kept the sexes from achieving total equality.”