Hitesh Joshi

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The Moving Mirror of Theory: Recalibrating Literary Interpretation from Formalism to History – An Evolving Theoretical Lens is neither a passive chronicle nor a nostalgic survey; it is an audacious re-inscription of the critical enterprise itself. The work traces, with deliberate precision, the tectonic shifts by which literary interpretation has been wrested from the sanctified autonomy of the text and thrust into the volatile matrices of history, ideology, and power. Commencing in the crystalline bastions of Formalism and New Criticism — where the literary artifact was venerated as a self-enclosed aesthetic mechanism — the book charts the subsequent insurgencies that refused such hermetic purity. Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Marxist hermeneutics, Feminist insurgencies, Postcolonial re-readings, and the restless energies of New Historicism are not merely enumerated but interrogated as interlocking vectors in a ceaseless dialectic of meaning-making. Here, theory is figured as a moving mirror: never static, never innocent, always refracting the literary text through the inflections of its own historical moment. Recalibration becomes both a method and a necessity — an ongoing attunement of critical lenses to the shifting constellations of culture, politics, and epistemology. The result is a book that does not simply instruct how to read; it compels the reader to reimagine what reading can signify in a world where literature is at once artifact, agent, and archive of human becoming. For scholars, students, and reflective practitioners of criticism, it offers not closure but an invitation — to inhabit, with rigor and imagination, the evolving horizons of interpretation itself.