Plain-language explanation.
Literary theory provides frameworks for reading, interpreting, and evaluating literary texts. It asks: what is literature? How do texts make meaning? What is the relationship between text, author, and reader? Different theoretical schools give radically different answers.
Core concepts and standard treatment.
Major literary theories include New Criticism (close reading, the text as self-sufficient), structuralism (Saussurean linguistics applied to narrative — Barthes, Todorov), post-structuralism and deconstruction (Derrida's différance, the instability of meaning), reader-response theory (Iser, Fish — meaning as co-created by readers), psychoanalytic criticism (Freudian and Lacanian readings), and Marxist criticism (ideology, base and superstructure — Althusser).
Deeper theory, debates and edge cases.
Advanced literary theory covers postcolonial theory (Said's Orientalism, Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak?'), feminist criticism (Showalter's gynocriticism, écriture féminine — Cixous), queer theory (Sedgwick, Butler), ecocriticism (literature and the environment), and digital humanities approaches to distant reading large literary corpora (Moretti, Jockers).
How it is applied in practice.
At the literary scholar and cultural critic level, practitioners publish in PMLA, New Literary History, and Critical Inquiry; teach theory on literature and cultural studies programmes; engage with translation studies (Venuti on foreignisation); apply theoretical frameworks to contemporary debates on representation, cancel culture, and the politics of the literary canon; and advise publishers on editorial diversity strategies.