BY THE MIDDLE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the New Critics had become an influential and authoritative force in literary studies. Yet the dominance of their formalist methodology, which concentrated on the linguistic and aesthetic features of literature, did not continue unchallenged for long. By the 1960s and 1970s, contextual-based approaches of interpretation began to develop, due in part to the growing interest in the social, political, and historical philosophies of continental Europe's intellectual tradition. These contextual approaches, which can be broadly categorized under the rubric of literary theory, initiated a fundamental reappraisal of formalism in general and the New Criticism in particular. This revisionary process did not merely remain confined to questions about methodology, and literary theory increasingly interrogated the proprietary canon that had emerged with formalism, especially high-modernist literature of the early interwar period. Formalist criticism had ennobled certain literary texts of the 1920s by treating them as “high art,” and while these texts continued to occupy a privileged position, they were progressively problematized in the second half of the twentieth century. In high modernism, literary theorists discerned manifestations of elitism, ahistoricism, misogyny, imperialism, and reactionary ideology in general. A critical reassessment of high modernism was first articulated in a systematic manner by theorists such as Peter Bürger, Fredric Jameson, and Andreas Huyssen, and their intellectual ideas, while not without detractors, have achieved relatively broad acceptance. Huyssen's claim that high modernism represses popular mass culture, for instance, has influenced numerous scholarly models of early twentieth-century culture. This chapter examines how these and other theorists came to perceive mainstream modernism's concentration on aesthetic form as a cover for tainted ethics.

Despite theory's admirable engagement with the conceptual questions about literature and literary interpretation, it is driven, at least in part, by practical ambitions. At universities and colleges, for instance, theory's opposition to the methods of the New Criticism helped establish it as the dominant mode of textual interpretation in scholarship and pedagogy. By rejecting the ostensible elitist attitude and reactionary politics of formalist criticism, theory demonstrated its commitment to democratic and egalitarian principles. Just as Marxist theory sought to empower the economically downtrodden, feminist theory sought to empower women and postcolonialist theory those disenfranchised by Western imperialism. In literary history, it is often possible to discern a narrative that asserts the progressive advancement of interpretative practices throughout the twentieth century.