Literary criticism: a concise political history PDF
Preview Literary criticism: a concise political history
Literary Criticism JOSEPH NORTH Literary Criticism A Concise Political History CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, AND LONDON, ENGLAND 2017 Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: North, Joseph, 1980– author. Title: Literary criticism : a concise political history / Joseph North. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2017. | Includes bibli- ographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016046677 | ISBN 9780674967731 Subjects: LCSH: Criticism—History—20th century. | Criticism—History—21st century. | Criticism—Political aspects. | Neoliberalism. Classification: LCC PN94 .N67 2017 | DDC 801/.950904—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046677 Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 1 The Critical Revolution Turns Right 21 2 The Scholarly Turn 56 3 The Historicist/Contextualist Paradigm 81 4 The Critical Unconscious 124 Conclusion: The Future of Criticism 195 Appendix: The Critical Paradigm and T. S. Eliot 213 Notes 219 Acknowledgments 247 Index 249 Preface I N THIS BOOK, I offer a rapid, synoptic overview of the basic paradigms that have governed the academic criticism of literature in much of the English-speaking world for the last century or so. If this is not the most pressing matter of our time, it is not the least pressing one, either. The study of literature is a test case—just one test case, but an important one—for a larger question that many people, I take it, acknowledge as central: the ques- tion of how and to what extent the societies in which we live allow us to cultivate deeper modes of life. People write histories of many different kinds, and for many different rea- sons. It may therefore help readers to frame and evaluate the book if I begin by saying a few words about the kind of history it is intended to be. Clearly, it is not an exhaustive history. No attempt has been made to cover all—or even most—of the major figures and movements in the history of literary criticism. Some important figures and movements do appear, of course—in fact, the book is largely structured around a very short list of individual figures—but many that were obviously central to the history of literary studies appear only in the notes, if indeed they appear at all. Nor, I am afraid, is it a particularly illustrative history: it has little interest in painting a rich and detailed picture of the periods it describes, nor in bringing the reader into close imaginative contact with the minds of historical actors. Lastly, it is not an evaluative history of the kind sometimes written by professors of
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