Critical pasts
Subtitle: writing criticism, writing history
By: edited by Philip Smallwood.
Contributors: Smallwood, Philip.
Series: Aperçus; Aperçus (Lewisburg, Pa.)
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Lewisburg, [Pa.]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 212
Subjects: English literature -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc.; Literature and history -- Great Britain.; Historiography -- Great Britain.; Criticism -- Great Britain.
Description: "This volume assembles new thinking on the theory, practice, and cultural value of the history of literary criticism. Focusing on a theme that has attracted relatively little developed theoretical commentary hitherto, the authors of these essays draw on specialist areas of critical history, and different kinds of problems, to illustrate the paradoxes, that attend any attempt to write the history of critical writing. Commentary begins with medieval literary theory, explores the social dimension of Restoration criticism, the relations between poetry and criticism, and a test case in eighteenth-century criticism's reception aesthetics. Other essays consider relations between eighteenth-century critical and literary history, between romanticism and New Historicism, and the various ways in which present and past criticism is interrelated. In an introduction to the volume, the editor calls for a clearer confrontation with the representational issues of critical history by those who write about the critical past."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : problems and paradoxes in the history of criticism / Philip Smallwood; title: Literary history, critical history, and the question of "medieval" theory / Stephen Penn; title: Abandoning theory : towards a social history of critical practices / Paul Trolander & Zeynep Tenger; title: On (not) writing literary and critical history : Dryden's preface to fables, ancient and modern / Tom Mason; title: To "value still the true" : Pope's essay on criticism and the problem of the historical mode / Philip Smallwood; title: Johnson's lives and the genealogy of late eighteenth-century literary history / April London; title: History and the new historicism : symbol & allegory as poetics of criticism / Gavin Budge; title: With love and wonder" : Empson, Donne and Milton / Adam Rounce; title: Truth, aesthetics, history / Robert Eaglestone; title: The end of criticism : literary criticism economics, and management discourse / Gary Day.