A History of Literary Criticism (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Course Material to Introduction to Literary Criticism
General objective: having learned the contents of this chapter, you are expected to conceptualize the definition of literary criticism and the contribution of each of the periods to the emergence of new kinds of literary criticisms across different historical times. Thus, you are expected to: • Recognize the concept of different periods, • Comprehend the different periods of human history and • Familiarize with the essences of the periods and the proponents in each of the periods.
Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Fein and Raybin, 2010
The last decade of Middle English scholarship has seen two monumental works of consolidation: The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, edited by David Wallace, and James Simpson's Reform and Cultural Revolution. 1 Reading them, one feels a sort of borrowed pride, and an astonished recognition of how much this last generation has accomplished: not just how many new initiatives have been put in motion, but how rich and coherent it all has proved, and how fully it has realized itself as an institutional settlement. Of course such successful consolidations are mixed blessings: they always sound a chill note of foreclosure and bespeak the near approach of diminishing returns. But at their best, they also sketch the outlines of new possibilities they cannot fully recognize. The great Wimsatt/Brooks history of criticism, meant to put New Criticism on a securer philosophical footing, instantly and ever after seemed its swan song, 2 but the authors' concern to peer past the edges of critical practice pointed toward theoretical and historicist efforts of later decades. In a similar way, these new literary histories of medieval England seem almost unwittingly to challenge the historicist settlement they represent-to challenge it just by undertaking to write literary history in the first place. It perhaps took such imposing accomplishments as these to show how resistant the historicist enterprise of the last decades is to narrating literary history, and what an impoverished conception of the literary it has produced. Literary history is not a species of our historicism but a challenge to it, insisting on what the latter has suppressed: the literary itself as a form of historical agency. This historicism seems to be boring even itself now, and at a moment when its sclerosis is provoking a rush back to aesthetic and formal questions within medieval studies and without, literary history suggests itself as a mediating term that might make this swing something more substantial, less mechanical and reactive, than a mere reversal of fashion.
literary history as a challenge to literary theory
In our time literary history has increasingly fallen into disrepute, and not at all without reason. The history of this worthy discipline in the last one hundred and fty years unmistakably describes the path of a steady decline. Its greatest achievements all belong to the nineteenth century. To write the history of a national literature counted, in the times of Gervinus and Scherer, De Sanctis and Lanson, as the crowning life's work of the philologist. The patriarchs of the discipline saw their highest goal therein, to represent in the history of literary works [Dichtwerke] the idea of national individuality on its way to itself. This high point is already a distant memory. The received form of literary history scarcely scratches out a living for itself in the intellectual life of our time. It has maintained itself in requirements for examinations by the state system of examinations that are themselves ready for dismantling. As a compulsory subject in the high school curriculum, it has almost disappeared in Germany. Beyond that, literary histories are still to be found only, if at all, on the bookshelves of the educated bourgeoisie who for the most part opens them, lacking a more appropriate literary dictionary, to answer literary quiz questions.
Ridho Satrio, 2019
history papers of English literature ranging from old English, middle English, Transition Period, Elizabeth period, Puritan period
A history of English literature
2002
This series aims to be comprehensive and succinct, and to recognize that to write literary history involves more than placing texts in chronological sequence. Thus the emphasis within each volume falls both on plotting the significant literary developments of a given period and on the wider cultural contexts within which they occurred. "Cultural history" is construed in broad terms and authors address such issues as politics, society, the arts, ideologies, varieties of literary production and consumption, and dominant genres and modes. Each volume evaluates the lasting effects of the literary period under discussion, incorporating such topics as critical reception and modern reputations. The effect of each volume is to give the reader a sense of possessing a crucial sector of literary terrain, of understanding the forces that give a period its distinctive cast, and of seeing how writing of a given period impacts on, and is shaped by, its cultural circumstances. Each volume recommends itself as providing an authoritative and up-to-date entrée to texts and issues, and their historical implications, and will therefore interest students, teachers and the general reader alike. The series as a whole will be attractive to libraries as a work that renews and redefines a familiar form.
Review Critical Literary History: Two Good Practices
The eighteenth century is certainly not the most popular period in Dutch literary history. The works that were published and the authors that were active in this period are mostly unknown to the public. Ask an average group of first-year students in Dutch language and culture about their image of the eighteenth century and their answer will most probably be 'none'. Already in its own time, eighteenth-century Dutch literature suffered from a lack of appreciation. In the Southern Netherlands, French was the dominant language and Dutch literature only fulfilled a minor role in cultural life. The Dutch Republic was simultaneously caught in an all-encompassing mood of decline, which led to an idolising of past literary heroes – Vondel, Cats – and envious glances at the blossoming literary cultures of neighbouring countries, first France, later Germany and Great Britain.