A History of Literary Criticism and Theory: From Plato to the Present

849 Pages·2005·4.95 MB·English

by  Men’s Fitness

A History of Literary Criticism
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For Yasmeen
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A History of Literary
Criticism
From Plato to the Present
M. A. R. Habib
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contents
© 2005 by M. A. R. Habib
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First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2005
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Habib, Rafey.
A history of literary criticism: from Plato to the present / M. A. R. Habib.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-631-23200-1 (hard cover: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-631-23200-1 (hard cover: alk. paper)
1. Criticism—History. I. Title.
PN86.H23 2005
801′.95′09—dc22
2005004898
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments viii
Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works ix
Introduction 1
Part I Ancient Greek Criticism 7
Classical Literary Criticism: Intellectual and Political Backgrounds 9
1 Plato (428–ca. 347 bc) 19
2 Aristotle (384–322 bc) 41
Part II The Traditions of Rhetoric 63
3 Greek Rhetoric 65
Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon, Lysias, Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle
4 The Hellenistic Period and Roman Rhetoric 80
Rhetorica, Cicero, Quintilian
Part III Greek and Latin Criticism During the Roman Empire 103
5 Horace (65–8 bc) 105
6 Longinus (First Century ad) 118
7 Neo-Platonism 129
Plotinus, Macrobius, Boethius
Part IV The Medieval Era 149
8 The Early Middle Ages 151
St. Augustine
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9 The Later Middle Ages 166
Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey de
Vinsauf, Ibn Rushd (Averroës), St. Thomas Aquinas
10 Transitions: Medieval Humanism 215
Giovanni Boccaccio, Christine de Pisan
Part V The Early Modern Period to the Enlightenment 227
11 The Early Modern Period 229
Giambattista Giraldi, Lodovico Castelvetro, Giacopo Mazzoni,
Torquato Tasso, Joachim Du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, Sir Philip Sidney,
George Gascoigne, George Puttenham
12 Neoclassical Literary Criticism 273
Pierre Corneille, Nicolas Boileau, John Dryden, Alexander Pope,
Aphra Behn, Samuel Johnson
13 The Enlightenment 311
John Locke, Joseph Addison, Giambattista Vico, David Hume,
Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft
Part VI The Earlier Nineteenth Century and Romanticism 347
Introduction to the Modern Period 349
14 The Kantian System and Kant’s Aesthetics 357
15 G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) 382
16 Romanticism (I): Germany and France 408
Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Germaine de Staël
17 Romanticism (II): England and America 428
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Edgar Allan Poe
Part VII The Later Nineteenth Century 467
18 Realism and Naturalism 469
George Eliot, Émile Zola, William Dean Howells, Henry James
19 Symbolism and Aestheticism 489
Charles Baudelaire, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde
20 The Heterological Thinkers 502
Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson,
Matthew Arnold
21 Marxism 527
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, György Lukács, Terry Eagleton
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Part VIII The Twentieth Century 555
The Twentieth Century: Backgrounds and Perspectives 557
22 Psychoanalytic Criticism 571
Freud and Lacan
23 Formalisms 602
Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson,
John Crowe Ransom, William K. Wimsatt, Monroe C. Beardsley, T. S. Eliot
24 Structuralism 631
Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes
25 Deconstruction 649
Jacques Derrida
26 Feminist Criticism 667
Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Showalter, Michèle Barrett,
Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous
27 Reader-Response and Reception Theory 708
Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser,
Stanley Fish
28 Postcolonial Criticism 737
Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha,
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
29 New Historicism 760
Stephen Greenblatt, Michel Foucault
Epilogue 772
Selective Bibliography 777
Index 791
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
would like to express my deepest gratitude to the following people for their
advice, their suggestions, their encouragement, and inspiration: Michael Payne,
IChris Fitter, Terry Eagleton, Frank Kermode, Andrew McNeillie, Kimberly Adams,
Mughni Tabassum, William Lutz, Geoffrey Sill, Robert Ryan, Monica Dantonio, Sandra
Sokowski, Mary Ellen Bray, Tommy Wright, Jenny Hunt, Emma Bennett, Mariam
Patel, Julie Still, Karen Wilson, and Ernest Hilbert. I would like to thank Tim Laquintano
for his invaluable assistance with the bibliography. I owe an inexpressible debt to my
mother Siddiqua Shabnam; to my children Hishaam and Hasan, who live within this
book; and to my wife Yasmeen, incomparable, to whom I dedicate it.
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ABBREVIATIONS OF
FREQUENTLY
CITED WORKS
CCP The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992).
CHLC The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press); V.I: Volume I: Classical Criticism, ed. George A. Kennedy
(1997); V.III: Volume III: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (1999);
V.IV: Volume IV: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude
Rawson (1997); V.V: Volume V: Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown (2000).
Curtius Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans.
Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).
GI Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Part One, ed. C. J.
Arthur (1970; rpt. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982).
HWP Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen
and Unwin, 1974).
LWC Literature and Western Civilization: The Classical World, ed. David Daiches
and Anthony Thorlby (London: Aldus Books, 1972).
MLC Medieval Literary Criticism: Translations and Interpretations, ed. O. B.
Hardison, Jr. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974).
MLTC Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c.1100–c.1375: The Commentary
Tradition, ed. A. J. Minnis, A. B. Scott, and David Wallace (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988).
PF Perry Anderson, Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso,
1985).
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