criticisms

• The orphan


  • Pinocchio, Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings, Disney princess such as Rapunzel, and Cinderella, Harry Potter
• The rebel


  • Han Solo (Star Wars), Dean Moriarty (On the Road), Humbert Humbert (Lolita), Batman (The Dark Knight)
• The ruler


  • Creon (Oedipus Rex), King Lear (King Lear), Aunt Sally (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), Tony Soprano (The Sopranos)
• The sage


  • Athena (The Odyssey), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Star Wars), Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs), The Oracle (The Matrix)
• Archetypal theory examines how a story resembles other stories in plot, character, setting, or symbolism, and how it depicts universal experiences and patterns
• Sociological criticism examines the relationship between the literary work and the social context in which it was created, including the conditions of production and the applicability of the work in studying the dynamics of a given society
• Historical criticism examines the social and intellectual surroundings in which the author wrote, considering the politics and social movements prevalent during the time period of the text's creation
• Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion, and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial hegemony (Western colonizers controlling the colonized)
• Post-modernism maintains that frameworks and systems are merely fictitious constructs and that they cannot be trusted to develop meaning or to give order
• Marxist criticism focuses on the connections between the content or form of a literary work and the economic, class, social or ideological factors that have shaped and determined it
• Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment, examining how the environment is represented, interacted with, and constructed in literary works
• Feminist criticism investigates how a literary work either tends to serve or to challenge a patriarchal (male dominated) view of society
• Gender studies and queer theory explore issues of sexuality, power, and marginalized populations (women as others) in literature and culture, analyzing the breakdown of binaries such as male and female