The Invention of English Criticism

Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-1-107-49852-5
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 228 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 340 g

Early literary criticism was undisciplined. Unlike the staid essays and monographs of later academic scholarship, English criticism first appeared in the contentious world of the London theater: dramatists and other poets argued about their craft in contending prefaces and dedications, and their disputes spilled into the public sphere in pamphlet wars, mock epics, lampoons, and even novels. Across these forms, criticism was personal, political, and unconcerned with analysis for its own sake. Yet this unruly discourse laid the groundwork both for modern literary criticism and for the discipline of literary studies. The Invention of English Criticism explores the earliest uses of criticism and the attempts by some to convert a field of literary debate into an archive of useful knowledge. Criticism's undisciplined past thus illuminates its contested, ambivalent, and never fully disciplined present.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gavin, Michael

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Nachschlagewerke
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: the textualization of judgment; 1. Criticism and the institutions of drama, 1645–75; 2. Politics of Parnassus; 3. Women among critics; 4. Criticism and the poetry of Anne Finch; 5. Disciplining the dunces: literary knowledge in The Dunciad Variorum; 6. Boswell and Co.: conversation and criticism in the age of print; Bibliography.

Über Autor(innen)

Gavin, Michael
Michael Gavin is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina. Before joining USC he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University.