The dissertation paints a cultural-historical portrait of the New Criticism, a formalist school of twentieth-century literary criticism. My case study revisits the trajectory of this vital school of thought through a fine-grained textual comparison of critical essays produced by principal affiliates. Using "genre" as a guiding concept, I ultimately find larger patterns of how these literary critics used their writing practice to negotiate individual and group identities. One of the most influential approaches in Anglo-American literary criticism, the New Criticism is the topic of a large body of scholarship. Missing, however, is a systematic, textual comparison of New Critical writings to explore how the practice looked "in vivo." To fills this gap, I compare select essays by five New Critics: William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Richard Palmer Blackmur, and Yvor Winters. I demonstrate how any historiography of literary criticism benefits from methods and concepts as they are more commonly used in semiotics and the social sciences. The basis of my analysis is a self-compiled corpus of 30 published essays by the five chosen critics. I compare these texts with regard to their discursive features, including the critics' choice of authors, their methodological procedures, theoretical ideologies, and writing styles. Tracing individual and collective changes in the New Critical writing practices over time I document, how the critics, for example, shifted their preferences to include new literary genres or re-admit non-formalist arguments in their interpretations. Eventually, I go beyond the specifics of the New Critics and suggest broader patterns of how academic communities form and change in literary studies. Because we see the parameters which a school of thought in literary studies used to reconstruct its field--breaking ground with a focus on certain literary genres or methodological taboos, among others--these parameters provide a comparative ground against which older, current, and coming movements can be measured. This meta-angle puts a seemingly random succession of approaches into historical and semiotic perspective. It allows us to see how any instance of critical writing is situated in the force fields of societal and academic justification, as well as of individualization and generification. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]