The Changing Nature of Textual Interpretation: From Traditional Literary Criticism to Contemporary Approaches

Abstract

Literary interpretation has never been a fixed or uniform practice. As theories of literature have developed, the ways in which readers understand texts have also undergone significant transformation. Traditional approaches often emphasized the author's intention, historical context, formal structure, or moral significance of a literary work. During the twentieth century, however, literary studies witnessed the emergence of structuralism, post-structuralism, reader-response theory, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies. These approaches challenged the assumption that a literary text possesses one stable and universally accepted meaning.