The term ‘theory’, in the context of literature, points to the different approaches employed in the close reading of a text. It tries to look into the question of what literature is and seeks out different perspectives to create meaning out of a text. Literary theory has its roots in the ancient world, in the ideas put forth by philosophers like Plato and sage Bharata. Traditional criticism was concerned with materials outside the text like, say, the author’s biography or the text’s historical importance. Modern literary theory arose in the late 1920s and 1930s as a reaction to the traditional approaches and it focussed only on the text for eliciting meaning. In the post- and post post eras, more and more new theories camd into existence. Some of the important schools of literary theory include historical and biographical criticism, New Criticism, Formalism, Russian formalism, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Marxism, Feminism, Post-colonialism, New Historicism, Deconstruction, Reader-response criticism,etc. The scope of literary theory is growing and today, there are plenty of emerging areas which are inter/multi-disciplinary in nature.