Before the development of new criticism and formalism, the common approach to interpreting literature was traditional literary criticism.
Traditional Literary criticism was used before the development of formalism and new criticism to interpret literature. Traditional literary criticism focuses on the author's biographical information and how it influences the work.
This criticism ignores reader response and focuses upon the author, time period, and text alone. Traditional literary criticism places the text back into the period which it came from in order for the reader to better understand the intent of the author.
Hence, before the development of new criticism and formalism, the literature was was interpreted by traditional literary criticism.
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