List of American literary critics


 * John Neal: Early American literary nationalist and regionalist
 * Edgar Allan Poe: Dark Romanticism, Short-Story Theory
 * T. S. Eliot: Modernism
 * Harold Bloom: Aestheticism
 * Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation, On Photography
 * John Updike: Literary realism/modernism and aestheticist critic
 * M. H. Abrams: The Mirror and the Lamp (study of Romanticism)
 * F. O. Matthiessen: originated the concept "American Renaissance"
 * Perry Miller: Puritan studies
 * Henry Nash Smith: founder of the "Myth and Symbol School" of American criticism
 * Leo Marx: The Machine in the Garden (study of technology and culture)
 * Leslie Fiedler: Love and Death in the American Novel
 * Stanley Fish: Pragmatism
 * Henry Louis Gates: African-American literary theory
 * Gerald Vizenor: Native American literary theory
 * William Dean Howells: Literary realism
 * Stephen Greenblatt: New Historicism
 * Geoffrey Hartman: Yale school of deconstruction
 * John Crowe Ransom: New Criticism
 * Cleanth Brooks: New Criticism
 * Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric studies
 * Elaine Showalter: Feminist criticism
 * Sandra M. Gilbert: Feminist criticism
 * Susan Gubar: Feminist criticism
 * Alicia Ostriker: feminist criticism
 * J. Hillis Miller: Deconstruction
 * Edward Said: Postcolonial criticism
 * Jonathan Culler: Critical theory, deconstruction
 * Judith Butler: Post-structuralist feminism
 * Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Latina literary theory
 * Ilan Stavans: Latino cultural theory
 * Frederick Luis Aldama: Latino literature in the United States
 * Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Queer theory
 * Fredric Jameson: Marxist criticism