Part of the evidence which we need to train ourselves to see in interpreting literay works is the evidence of literature’s material relations to society; more specifically, how the details of history inform not only the subject-matter of books also dictate the conditions in which books are produced and read, then forgotten and handed on to later generations. What we are not accustomed to considering, in general terms, is what publishing history and the physical constituents of books can tell the critical reader.

Another dimension of the critical effort of the period: is a conviction that major literary works speak with some kind of finality to the fundamental realities of human experience.

By the end of the 19^th century, realism was evolving into naturalism, as.exemplified by the works of emile Zola in France and Frank Norris among others in USA. Nearly evry major writer between 1900 and 1930 was influenced by naturalism.

The main opposition to naturalism came from a group of American university professors. The central figure of the neohumanist movement was Paul Elmer More.

The technique of detailed ‘analysis’ was developed in several important books of the 1920s. Two trends in the criticism of the period can be clearly distinguished. Trends that are not antagonist, but in essence quite distinct. On the one hand there are Eliot’s more analytic and detailed pieces and then there is a ‘Symbolic writing’.

No movement has had so great impact on the 20^th century criticism as the so-called new criticism, which was generally influenced by T.S. Elliot; it began as a distinctive school in the late 1930s with the publication of The words Body 1938 .by the critic and poet John Crowe.

The theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud have had an enormous impact on 20thc criticism.

Several influencial 20^th century literary critics worked independently of any particular critical movement. Among them was the American writer Edmund Wilson, whose Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginatve Literature is considered one of the major critical pronouncements of the century.............

By midcentury existencialism, a new philosophical movement, occasioned a critical reexamination of earlier writers. Studies such as Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A study in Existentialism (1960) by John Killinger show that after a naturalist begining actually received a existentialist vision of life.

More recent aproaches to the critical evaluation of literature include those from the standpoints of semiotics(the study of the function of sins and symbols) hermeneutics (the science of interpretation.

One of the foremost theorists of structuralist criticism was Ronald Barthes, for whom criticism was a 'secondary language'.