The Cambridge History Of Literary Criticism Volume 9 Twentieth Century Historical Philosophical And Psychological Perspectives

This ninth volume in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism presents a wide-ranging survey of developments in literary criticism and theory during the last century. Drawing on the combined expertise of a large team of specialist scholars, it offers an authoritative account of the various movements of thought that have made the late twentieth century such a richly productive period in the history of criticism. The aim has been to cover developments which have had greatest impact on the academic study of literature, along with background chapters that place those movements in a broader, intellectual, national and socio-cultural perspective. In comparison with Volumes Seven and Eight, also devoted to twentieth-century developments, there is marked emphasis on the rethinking of historical and philosophical approaches, which have emerged, especially during the past two decades, as among the most challenging areas of debate.

This volume in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism brings together a wide range of highly informative essays on developments in literary criticism and theory during the twentieth century. The main focus is on historical, philosophical and sociocultural approaches to literature and it offers both authoritative treatments of the topics under review and a lively sense of engagement and dialogue among the contributors. It has a full bibliographical apparatus and provides an invaluable resource for readers who are seeking to orient themselves in this complex and often bewildering field.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism focuses on criticism in the Classical period up to about A.D. 325. This first survey examines the beginnings of critical consciousness in Greece, including the functions of poetry and the role of poets in early Greek society, and continues with authoritative discussion of the critical writings of Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle and Hellenistic scholars. It examines Roman figures including Horace, Cicero, Quintilian and Tacitus, and also considers Greek critics of the Augustan and imperial periods such as Longinus, and the neo-platonic, Christian and grammatical writers of later antiquity.

This is a comprehensive 1997 account of the history of literary criticism in Britain and Europe between 1660 and 1800. Unlike previous histories, it is not just a chronological survey of critical writing, but a multidisciplinary investigation of how the understanding of literature and its various genres was transformed, at the start of the modern era, by developments in philosophy, psychology, the natural sciences, linguistics, and other disciplines, as well as in society at large. In the process, modern literary theory - at first often implicit in literary texts themselves - emancipated itself from classical poetics and rhetoric, and literary criticism emerged as a full-time professional activity catering for an expanding literate public. The volume is international both in coverage and in authorship. Extensive bibliographies provide guidance for further specialised study.

This ninth volume in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism presents a wide-ranging survey of developments in literary criticism and theory during the last century. Drawing on the combined expertise of a large team of specialist scholars, it offers an authoritative account of the various movements of thought that have made the late twentieth century such a richly productive period in the history of criticism. The aim has been to cover developments which have had greatest impact on the academic study of literature, along with background chapters that place those movements in a broader, intellectual, national and socio-cultural perspective. In comparison with Volumes Seven and Eight, also devoted to twentieth-century developments, there is marked emphasis on the rethinking of historical and philosophical approaches, which have emerged, especially during the past two decades, as among the most challenging areas of debate.

The history of the most hotly debated areas of literary theory, including structuralism and deconstruction.

It appears that literary work possesses eternal temporal validity due to its autonomous aesthetic value, whereas criticism provides points of view having temporary and transitory significance. Despite such claims, the vector of methodology in our series of books, dealing with the history of English literature, relies on Viktor Shklovsky, T. S. Eliot, Mikhail Bakhtin, and especially Yuri Tynyanov, whose main reasoning would be that literature is a system of dominant, central and peripheral, marginalized elements – to us, “tradition” (centre) versus “innovation” (margin) engaged in a “battle” for supremacy, demarginalization, and the right to form a new literary system – and the development or historical advancement of literature is the substitution of systems. Roman Jakobson and French structuralism, on the whole, later Linda Hutcheon, with her “system” and “constant”, and Bran Nicol with the “dominant”, to say nothing about Itamar Even-Zohar and his theory of polysystem, to a certain extent Julia Kristeva, and even Homi Bhabha – as well as our humble contribution, by means of the books in the present series, we would like to believe – maintain Tynyanov’s line of thinking and concepts alive, which have developed and emerged nowadays more like a kind of “neo-formalism”.