The followings are approaches commonly utilized as perspectives criticizing literary works.
Cultural Materialism is a study about historical material in a politic frame. Cultural Materialism connects to historical documentation, analysis, and re-creates a view about a certain history period. Cultural Materialism also criticizes hegemonic pressure in society in creating canon works.
Ecocriticism is a study about relation of literature and natural environment. Ecocriticism is an elaborated genre from several similar names; green cultural studies, ecopoetics, and environmental literary criticism.
Existentialism is a philosophical movement which brings an idea that human-beings create meaning and essence of their own lives, and, therefore philosophy must be based on the concrete human-being, that is, human-being as existence. Some existentialists, with their different views, are Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Berdyaev, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus (although Camus himself did not want to be called an existentialist).
Feminism is a movement that proclaims unequal role between male and female. Feminist theory aims to understand the inequality, and, it focuses on political gender, power relation, and sexuality.
Formalism is a way to analyze a literary work, especially focused on its form, not in its content. Formalist theory concentrates more on the discussion of text features, especially linguistic properties being used, rather than the context of creation and the context of reception.
Gynocriticism is a study about the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writings by women, the psychodynamics of female creativity, the trajectory of the individual or collective female career, and the evolution or laws of a female literary tradition.
Liberal Humanism tries to bridge reader and literary text based on some principles; that good literature has eternal meaning, that the meaning of literature is inside, that human nature and characters stay the same, and that literary form and content can not be separated.
Marxism is a theory and also a political practice derived from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' thinking. The aim of Marxism is to create a society without class based on the ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.
In the beginning, Narratology is a part of Structuralism. Narratologists study narrative structure and how the structure influences readers’ perception. Narratology is an effort to study the characteristic of a ‘story’ as a concept and as a cultural practice.
New Historicism is an approach and literary theory based on the understanding that a literary work is a product of time, place, and the circumstances of creation. These approach and theory aim to understand literary works through historical contexts and to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature.
Postcolonial theory is, basically, a discussion of anti-colonial reactions and the effects of colonialism. This discussion includes, for example; the sufferings of the colonized and the domination of the colonizer, struggle for independence, the created images of colonized people by colonialists and their anti-thesis, acculturation, and the resistence against colonialists’ single truth of language.
Stylistics is a critical approach which uses linguistic methods and science to study literary and non-literary works. This approach aims to study how linguistic features influence the whole meaning of a work and the effects for the readers.
Surrealism, a reaction and resistence against rasionalism, is often called as ’the absolute reality’. These concept and idea, based on the freedom of mind and the expression of realization in dreams presented without conscious control, show the incongruous images so that it gives illogical, confusing impression.