Short answers, pulled from the story.
New Criticism took its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism. Ransom, who taught at Kenyon College, was also a central figure in developing the movement's ideas and training its key practitioners.
The intentional fallacy is the idea, introduced by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their 1946 essay "The Intentional Fallacy", that an author's intended meaning is irrelevant to the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, only the words on the page mattered; meaning imported from outside the text was considered a distraction.
The affective fallacy, also introduced by Wimsatt and Beardsley, holds that a reader's personal or emotional reaction to a literary work is not a valid tool for analyzing that text. It was later repudiated by theorists from the reader-response school, including Stanley Fish, who criticized it in his 1970 essay "Literature in the Reader".
The major figures include John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, W. K. Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley. Cambridge scholar I. A. Richards and poet-critic T. S. Eliot were also highly influential in shaping the movement's methodology and canon.
New Criticism dominated American university literary study in the middle decades of the 20th century, with its peak during the Cold War years between 1950 and the mid-1970s. It was challenged by structuralism and post-structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s.
New Criticism was challenged first by structuralism and post-structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s, then by feminist literary criticism, deconstructionist theory, New Historicism, and reception theory. Despite losing its dominant position, its core method of close reading remained a foundational tool in subsequent theoretical approaches.