Critical Pasts: Writing Criticism/writing History (APERCUS (LEWISBURG, PA.).) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 083875595X ISBN 13: 9780838755952

Publisher: Bucknell University Press,U.S., 2004

Synopsis

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. Philip Smallwood is Professor of English at the University of Central England.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Smallwood is Professor of English at the University of Central England in Birmingham, and the author, most recently, of Reconstructing Criticism: Pope's "Essay on Criticism" and the Logic of Definition (Bucknell University Press, 2003) and Johnson's Critical Presence: Image, History, Judgment (Ashgate Publishing, 2004).

Edition details

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press,U.S.
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 083875595X
• ISBN 13: 9780838755952
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 221
• Editor: Smallwood Philip