Formalism, New Criticism:  stresses the formal or structural qualities of the work over its historical or social significance.  Literature is seen as autonomous, and the role of criticism is to evaluate the interaction of literary elements such as narrative structure, symbolism, or language use.  Developing in the 1930s and still widely used in literature classrooms today, American New Criticism reacts to the Victorian emphasis on authorial biography and history as a means of understanding literature;  it refutes the idea that literature has a "moral purpose" and insists instead that literature is its own end. Formalism derives from Russian and Central European Schools in the 1920s and 1930s that examined the linguistic aspects of literature.