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Historical Development of Literary Criticism

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Historical Development of Literary Criticism

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A period before middle ages which is known as Ancient era.

The poet as a man and poetry as a form of statement both seemed untrustworthy.

Originality are matters to Plato.

Aristotle countered Plato's literary criticism by emphasizing what is normal and useful about the literary arts.

Even though Plato and Aristotle have different perspective in literary criticism, they have also the same idea including believing the poetry is numeric, both dealing with the arousal of emotions in the perceiver and so on.

Later, Greek and Roman criticism offers no parallel to Aristotle's originality.

Horace's verse epistle "The Art of Poetry" is an urbane amplification of Aristotle's emphasis on the decorum or internal propriety of each genre.

Longinus, on the sublime, by the Roman-Greek known as "Longinus", was to become influential in the 18th century but for a contrary reason.

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In the Christian Middle Ages criticism suffered from the loss of nearly all the ancient critical texts and from an anti-pagan distrust of the literary imagination.

Encyclopaedists ad textual commentators explained the supposed Christian content  of pre-Christian works and the Old Testament

Although there was no shortage of rhetoricians to prescribe how literary figures should be used, no attempt was made to derive critical principles from emerging genres such as the fabliau and the chivalric romance.

Criticism was really hampered by the coherence of the theologically explained cosmos. When nature is seen as as an eternally and purposely symbolic of revealed truth, literary difficulties of form and meaning are inevitably overlooked.

Even Dante, a 14th-century vernacular poet, appears to have anticipated his Divine Comedy to be understood according to scriptural exegesis criteria.

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The rediscovery of old literature, most notably Giorgio Valla's translation of Aristotle's Poetics into Latin in 1498, fueled Renaissance critique.

By 1549, the Poetics had also been translated into Italian.

From this time until the late 18th century, Aristotle was once again the most powerful figure in literary theory.

Critics resorted to ancient poetry and plays for guidance on the eternal rules of art. Lodovico Castelvetro, whose 1570 commentary on Aristotle's Poetics advocated the composition of tightly organized plays by expanding and codifying Aristotle's theory of dramatic unities, was possibly the most important Renaissance critic.

It is difficult to understand now how this homage to antique models was freeing; one must remember that imitation of the ancients required abandoning scripture metaphor and proclaiming the individual author's goal to produce works that were openly magnificent and beautiful.

Classicism, individualism, and national pride joined forces against literary asceticism. Thus, a group of 16th-century French writers known as the Pléiade—notably Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay—were simultaneously classicists, poetic innovators, and advocates of a purified vernacular tongue.

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The Renaissance in general could be regarded as a neoclassical period, in that ancient works were considered the surest models for modern greatness.

Neoclassicism, however, usually connotes narrower attitudes that are at once literary and social: a worldly-wise tempering of enthusiasm, a fondness for proved ways, a gentlemanly sense of propriety and balance.

Criticism of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in France, was dominated by these Horatian norms.

French critics such as Pierre Corneille and Nicolas Boileau urged a strict orthodoxy regarding the dramatic unities and the requirements of each distinct genre, as if to disregard them were to lapse into barbarity. The poet was not to imagine that his genius exempted him from the established laws of craftsmanship.

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The Romantic movement had been spurred not only by German philosophy but also by the universalistic and utopian hopes that accompanied the French Revolution. Some of those hopes were thwarted by political reaction, while others were blunted by industrial capitalism and the accession to power of the class that had demanded general liberty.

Advocates of the literary imagination now began to think of themselves as enemies or gadflies of the newly entrenched bourgeoisie. In some hands the idea of creative freedom dwindled to a bohemianism pitting “art for its own sake” against commerce and respectability.

Aestheticism characterized both the Symbolist criticism of Charles Baudelaire in France and the self-conscious decadence of Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde in England.

At an opposite extreme, realistic and naturalistic views of literature as an exact record of social truth were developed by Vissarion Belinsky in Russia, Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola in France, and William Dean Howells in the United States. Zola’s program, however, was no less anti-bourgeois than that of the Symbolists; he wanted novels to document conditions so as to expose their injustice.

Post-Romantic disillusion was epitomized in Britain in the criticism of Matthew Arnold, who thought of critical taste as a substitute for religion and for the unsatisfactory values embodied in every social class.

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The ideal of objective research has continued to guide Anglo-American literary scholarship and criticism and has prompted work of unprecedented accuracy. Bibliographic procedures have been revolutionized; historical scholars, biographers, and historians of theory have placed criticism on a sounder basis of factuality.

Important contributions to literary understanding have meanwhile been drawn from anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Impressionistic method has given way to systematic inquiry from which gratuitous assumptions are, if possible, excluded.

Yet demands for a more ethically committed criticism have repeatedly been made, from the New Humanism of Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt in the United States in the 1920s, through the moralizing criticism of the Cambridge don F.R. Leavis and of the American poet Yvor Winters, to the most recent demands for “relevance.”

No sharp line can be drawn between academic criticism and criticism produced by authors and men of letters.

Many of the latter are now associated with universities, and the main shift of academic emphasis, from impressionism to formalism, originated outside the academy in the writings of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and T.E. Hulme, largely in London around 1910. Only subsequently did such academics as I.A. Richards and William Empson in England and John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks in the United States adapt the New Criticism to reform of the literary curriculum—in the 1940s. New Criticism has been the methodological counterpart to the strain of modernist literature characterized by allusive difficulty, paradox, and indifference or outright hostility to the democratic ethos. In certain respects the hegemony of New Criticism has been political as well as literary; and anti-Romantic insistence on irony, convention, and aesthetic distance has been accompanied by scorn for all revolutionary hopes. In Hulme conservatism and classicism were explicitly linked. Romanticism struck him as “spilt religion,” a dangerous exaggeration of human freedom.

In reality, however, New Criticism owed much to Romantic theory, especially to Coleridge’s idea of organic form, and some of its notable practitioners have been left of centre in their social thought.