Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. It is essentially an opinion, supported by evidence, relating to theme, style, setting, or historical or political context. Literary criticism can be divided into different types, including practical criticism, which is the interpretation of meaning and the judgment of quality. Literary criticism is not the same as aesthetics, which is the philosophy of artistic value, or other matters that may concern the student of literature, such as biographical questions, bibliography, historical knowledge, sources and influences, and problems of method.

Literary criticism may have a positive or negative bias and may be a study of an individual piece of literature or an author’s body of work. It is often published in essay or book form, and academic literary critics teach in literature departments and publish in academic journals, while more popular critics publish their reviews in broadly circulating periodicals.

The purpose of literary criticism is to help a reader better engage with or challenge a piece of writing, and to deepen our understanding of literature and contribute to its development over time. Literary criticism can broaden a readers understanding of an authors work by summarizing, interpreting, and exploring its value.

There are different approaches to literary criticism, such as new criticism, deconstruction, new historicism, queer theory, reader response, or structuralism. Researching literary criticism may require finding information on a specific theory, in which case encyclopedias or dictionaries of literary terms may be helpful starting points. For a literary critique of a work, scholarly articles and book chapters are more appropriate than general web sources.