CLASSICAL CRITICISM: A CRITICAL ENQUIRY (original) (raw)

Abstract Literary creation and criticism are two significant facets of human life. Creation is almost as old as human history and criticism is nearly as old as literature. The study of literature requires the knowledge of contexts as well as texts. What kind of person wrote the poem, the play, the fiction and the essay? What forces acted upon them as they wrote? What was the historical, the political, the economic and the cultural background? Was the writer accepting or rejecting the literary convention of time, or developing them, or creating entirely new kinds of literary expression? Are there interactions between literature and art, music or architecture of its periods? Was the writer affected by contemporaries or isolated? The present paper is an attempt to interpret the answers by the critical enquiry of classical criticism. The classicists form the foundations of contemporary theories of criticism. Key Words: I