Semiotic literary criticism, also known as literary semiotics, analyzes literature through the theory of signs (semiotics), heavily influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralism. Emerging from Russian formalism and structuralist linguistics, early figures like Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Julius Greimas, and Viktor Shklovsky aimed to establish a "literary mathematics" by developing formal notations for narrative components. A seminal example is Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (originally published in 1928), which systematically categorized folktale characters and plot events using letter designations to uncover their underlying structures.
Over time, as structuralism evolved into post-structuralism, later semiotic approaches became less rigidly systematic and adopted a more "playful" methodology. Nevertheless, this field continued to thrive, with later prominent authors such as Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Julia Kristeva, and Mikhail Bakhtin further exploring the semiotic dimensions of literary texts.