This episode offers a comprehensive overview of two closely related literary theories: Practical Criticism and New Criticism, detailing their origins, core tenets, and differences. Practical Criticism, pioneered by I. A. Richards in Britain during the 1920s, focused on a close reading of poetry to analyse the text's language, imagery, and structure without external context, treating the poem as a stimulus for the reader's psychological experience. New Criticism, emerging primarily in the United States in the 1930s and 40s with figures like Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom, developed out of this British movement. Still, it formalised the approach into a broader, systematic theory that applied to all literary genres. A central tenet of New Criticism is the concept of textual autonomy, which asserts that a literary work is a self-contained aesthetic object whose objective meaning is found internally, leading to concepts such as the Intentional Fallacy and the Affective Fallacy. While both movements champion close reading and the text itself over biographical or historical context, Practical Criticism is often described as a teaching method concerned with the reader's direct experience, while New Criticism is a formal theory aimed at establishing a unified, objective interpretation of the work's structure.