A core idea of New Criticism. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argue in ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1954), that the author’s intentions---that is, the vision the author has of what they are trying to achieve in a particular work---are not a valid basis for critical judgement about a text’s relative worth as literature. Crudely put, the fact that an author thought they were writing the great realist novel of their time is not sufficient to make it so. By the same token, just because they failed to realize their intention to write a great realist novel is no reason to disregard the work’s other potential merits. Rather, one must concentrate on its formal properties because these and these alone are sufficient to distinguish good literature from bad. See also affective fallacy.