define criticism and theory blogs:

Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature.However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes which are of relevance to the way humans interpret meaning.In the humanities, the latter style of scholarship is often called simply "theory".