Critics have tended to ask two sorts of questions: (a) What event does the text refer to, and what do those events mean? (b) What theological ideas did the author of this text have? ‘Meaning’ is located, in these models, in the one case in the events themselves, in the other in the beliefs of the writers. The newer formalist or structuralist literary criticism, however, looks for meaning in neither of these, but in the literary form or structure itself.
