Contravariant finiteness and pure semisimple rings

We show that the left pure semisimplicity of a left artinian ring can be characterized by the contravariant finiteness of subcategories of finitely generated left R-modules. Various criteria, in terms of the contravariant and covariant finiteness conditions, are obtained for a left pure semisimple ring to be of finite representation type. As an application of our methods, it is shown that a ring R is of finite representation type if and only if every right R-module is both finitely generated and finitely cogenerated over its endomorphism ring.