LITERARY CRITICISM

a discipline concerned with a range of enquiries about literature that have tended to fall into three broad categories: philosophical, descriptive, and evaluative. Criticism asks what literature is, what it does, and what it is worth. The Western critical tradition begins with Plato in the 4th century BC. In his Republic he attacked the poets on two fronts: their art was merely imitative, and it appealed to the worst rather than to the best in human nature. These are the charges that Aristotle countered a generation later in his Poetics by claiming for literature a level of imaginative truth that transcends that of imitation, and by arguing that it excited the emotions simply in order to allay them. The taxonomy of literary forms that Aristotle developed and the principles of composition he affirmed were of signal importance to the literature of Renaissance Europe. As late as 1674 Nicolas Boileau was still, in his L'Art Potique, recommending observance of the Aristotelian rules, or unities, of time, action, and place. European literary criticism from the Renaissance on has for the most part focused on the same two issues that underlie the debate between Plato and Aristotle: the moral worth of literature and the nature of its relationship with reality. At the end of the 16th century Sir Philip Sidney returned to the question in his Defence of Poesie, arguing that it was the special property of literature to express moral and philosophical truths in a way that rescued them from abstraction and made them immediately graspable. A century later, John Dryden, in Of Dramatick Poesie, An Essay (1668), put forward the less idealistic view that the business of literature was primarily to offer an accurate representation of the world for the delight and instruction of mankind. This remains the assumption of the great critical works of 18th-century England, underlying both Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711) and the extensive work of Samuel Johnson. In the late 18th century, literary criticism began to reflect the influence of the growing Romantic movements in England and Germany. William Wordsworth's assertion in his Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800) that the object of poetry is truth . . . carried alive into the heart by passion marks a significant change from the ideas of the mid-century. Other important statements of critical theory in the Romantic period were Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817), which drew heavily on the work of such German theorists as F.W.J. Schelling and A.W. Schlegel, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's Defence of Poetry (written 1821). The later 19th century saw a development in one direction toward an aesthetic theory of art for art's sake, which enjoyed considerable influence in France and England, and in another direction toward the view, expressed by Matthew Arnold, that the cultural role of literature should be to take over the sort of moral and philosophical functions that had previously been fulfilled by religion. For the future of literary criticism, however, the most important change during the final years of the century was the gradual establishment of literature as an academic discipline. In the 20th century there has been a massive increase in the volume of literary criticism. An early product of this in the English-speaking world was I.A. Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), which became influential as the basis of Practical Criticism. From this developed the New Criticism of the 1940s and '50s, which was associated with such American critics as John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks. The premise of the New Critics, that a work of literature should be studied as a separate and self-contained entity, set them in opposition both to biographical criticism and to those schools of criticismMarxist, psychoanalytical, historical, and the likethat had their roots in the 19th century and that set out to examine literature from perspectives external to the text. The late 20th century saw a radical reappraisal of traditional modes of literary criticism. Building on the work of the Russian Formalist critics of the 1920s and the examinations of linguistic structure carried out by the Swiss philologist Ferdinand de Saussure, literary theorists began to question the overriding importance of the concept of the author as the source of the text's meaning. Structuralist and poststructuralist critics, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida of France, instead directed attention toward the ways in which meaning is created by the determining structures of language and culture. the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as a term, to any argumentation about literature, whether or not specific works are analyzed. Plato's cautions against the risky consequences of poetic inspiration in general in his Republic are thus often taken as the earliest important example of literary criticism. More strictly construed, the term covers only what has been called practical criticism, the interpretation of meaning and the judgment of quality. Criticism in this narrow sense can be distinguished not only from aesthetics (the philosophy of artistic value) but also from other matters that may concern the student of literature: biographical questions, bibliography, historical knowledge, sources and influences, and problems of method. Thus, especially in academic studies, criticism is often considered to be separate from scholarship. In practice, however, this distinction often proves artificial, and even the most single-minded concentration on a text may be informed by outside knowledge, while many notable works of criticism combine discussion of texts with broad arguments about the nature of literature and the principles of assessing it. Criticism will here be taken to cover all phases of literary understanding, though the emphasis will be on the evaluation of literary works and of their authors' places in literary history. For another particular aspect of literary criticism, see textual criticism. Additional reading A useful compilation of essential texts on literary criticism is Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie (eds.), Criticism, rev. ed. (1958). The best survey of critical history is William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957); G.M.A. Grube, The Greek and Roman Critics (1965); Joel E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 5th ed. (1925, paperback edition 1963); Walter J. Bate, From Classic to Romantic (1946, reprinted 1961); and Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 17501950, 4 vol. (195565), are more specialized historical studies. Important theoretical statements are M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953); Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd rev. ed. (1966); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957); and Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (1956, reprinted 1963); Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946; Eng. trans. 1953); and Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950), are representative examples of modern criticism, combining theory with analysis of a wide variety of texts. See also Douwe W. Fokkema and Elrud Kunne-Ibsch, Theories of Literature in the Twentieth Century: Structuralism, Marxism, Aesthetics of Reception, Semiotics (1978).