Which option describes a role of literary theory in literary study?

• A. It interprets the work
• B. It records publication dates
• C. It analyzes sales data
• D. It reproduces texts

Answer: (A)

Literary theory provides lenses for reading and understanding a text, focusing on how meaning is produced—through language, form, and social context. By applying frameworks such as gender, class, ideology, or discourse analysis, it helps you interpret what the work is doing, what messages it conveys, and how readers might be invited to respond. This interpretive work is the core purpose of theory in literary study: it explains how meanings are constructed and why they matter. Recording when a work was published, analyzing sales numbers, or reproducing the text are tasks tied to bibliographic facts, market data, or transmission, not to the interpretive role of theory.