This approach emphasizes the role of women in literature, either as authors and poets or as characters in a narrative. These critics might examine how Emily Bronte displayed a uniquely feminine viewpoint toward her heroine in her novel Wuthering Heights.

This approach is concerned purely with how a text's literary element contribute to a coherent whole. It prefers to address question of style, word choice, and use of conventions instead of biographical or historical sources.

This approach focuses on how details of the writer's life and period she or he lived in are reflected in the work and explain how it was produced. Also called traditional criticism.

This critical approach views literature through a political/sociological lens, often focusing on how a work depicts or glosses over the exploitation of workers by wealthy or powerful interests.

This is a theoretical and interpretive mode that examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression. In adopting this approach, scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice. Closely connected to such fields as philosophy, history, sociology, and law, this approach to literature traces racism in America through the nation's legacy of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and recent events.

This school or criticism combs the language and plots of literary works for examples of Freudian concepts such as repressed consciousness, the struggle of the superego, the Oedipus complex, etc.

This theory is the study of what is understood as masculine and/or feminine and/or queer behavior in any given context, community, society, or field of study (including, but not limited to, literature, history, sociology, education, applied linguistics, religion, health sciences, philosophy, cultural studies).

This approach to literature resists the notion that "...history is a series of events that have a linear, causal relationship: event A caused event B; event B caused event C; and so on" (Tyson 278). On the contrary, this theoretical lens seeks to reconnect a text with the time period in which it was produced and identify it with the cultural and political movements of the time in which it was produced.

This literary approach holds that human nature is essentially unchanging. The same passions, emotions, and even situations are seen again and again throughout human history. It follows that continuity in literature is more important and significant than innovation. In addition, this approach presumes that good literature is of timeless significance; it somehow transcends the limitations and peculiarities of the age it was written in and thereby speaks to what is constant in human nature. Lastly, this theory is the foundation of New Criticism or Formalist theory.