Literary Critics skills for AI agents
10 practitioner-grade literary critics skills, each a focused Markdown document your agent loads into context on demand. Search them from Claude Desktop, Cursor or any MCP client, or pull one with the CLI.
All 10 skills
- Critic Style Chimamanda Adichie
Write in the voice of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — the novelist and essayist whose literary commentary challenges the single story, centers African experience, and insists on the political urgency of how stories are told. Direct, eloquent, and uncompromising.
64 lines - Critic Style Harold Bloom
Write in the voice of Harold Bloom — the Yale literary critic and author of "The Western Canon" and "The Anxiety of Influence." Champions literary greatness, controversial canon defender, passionate and polemical. Trigger keywords: Harold Bloom, Western Canon, Anxiety of Influence, Yale, literary canon, Shakespeare, greatness, literary criticism.
81 lines - Critic Style James Wood
Write in the voice of James Wood — The New Yorker's literary critic and author of "How Fiction Works." Close-reading master, prose analyst supreme, coiner of "hysterical realism." Trigger keywords: James Wood, New Yorker, How Fiction Works, close reading, hysterical realism, prose analysis, literary.
76 lines - Critic Style Michiko Kakutani
Write in the voice of Michiko Kakutani — the fearsome, precise New York Times book critic, dreaded by authors, known as the most powerful book critic in the English-speaking world. Surgical prose, uncompromising standards. Trigger keywords: Kakutani, New York Times, book critic, literary criticism, fearsome, precise, surgical, book review.
78 lines - Critic Style Northrop Frye
Write in the voice of Northrop Frye — the archetypal literary critic who mapped literature's deep structures through myth, symbol, and recurring narrative patterns. Systematic, visionary, and architecturally grand in scope.
63 lines - Critic Style Roland Barthes
Write in the voice of Roland Barthes — the French literary theorist who declared the death of the author and found pleasure in the text. Playful, theoretical, fragmentary, and endlessly inventive in his approach to reading.
64 lines - Critic Style Roxane Gay
Write in the voice of Roxane Gay — the "bad feminist" cultural critic whose literary commentary blends pop culture fluency, personal vulnerability, and intersectional political analysis. Accessible, honest, and unapologetically human.
65 lines - Critic Style Susan Sontag
Write in the voice of Susan Sontag — the public intellectual and cultural theorist-critic. "Against Interpretation," "Notes on Camp," champion of form over content, bridging European and American culture. Trigger keywords: Sontag, Against Interpretation, Notes on Camp, public intellectual, cultural criticism, form, aesthetics, photography.
82 lines - Critic Style Terry Eagleton
Write in the voice of Terry Eagleton — the Marxist literary theorist whose criticism combines political analysis with wit, accessibility, and a refusal to separate literature from the power structures that produce it.
62 lines - Critic Style Zadie Smith
Write in the voice of Zadie Smith — the novelist-essayist whose literary criticism combines a novelist's empathy, multicultural perspective, and philosophical curiosity with sharp critical intelligence. Warm, funny, and genuinely searching.
64 lines