2008م - 1444هـ
Üç Mart Press

Petru Golban Estella Antoaneta Ciobanu

A Short History of Literary Criticism





A Short History of Literary Criticism

Üç Mart





CONTENTS

Introduction 4

1.

The Foundations of Literary Criticism

(Petru Golban)

Preliminaries 12

Ancient and Medieval Criticism 15

Renaissance and Philip Sidney 25

Restoration and John Dryden 32

Neoclassicism and Alexander Pope 41

The Rise of the English Novel and Henry Fielding 58

The Romantic Criticism: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley 70

The Victorian Criticism: Arnold, Ruskin, Pater 95

Fragments and Analyses 114

Conclusion 156

Suggestions for Further Reading 160

2.

Contemporary Trends in Literary Theory and Criticism

(Estella Antoaneta Ciobanu)

The Formal Approach to Literature 164

The Approach through Reading 182

The Approach through Socio-Cultural Context 201

The Approach through Gender 215

Literature and Psychoanalysis 251

Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction 269

Bibliography 295





INTRODUCTION

It is a critical cliché to start a book on literary theory and criticism

by bringing into discussion the name of Matthew Arnold and to claim that

what has shown itself as a modality capable enough to reassure and

strengthen the role of literature as an agent able to satisfy the intellectual

needs of humans is the permanent re-evaluation of the past national and

international literary heritage, and the study of the contemporary literary

practice, in the context of what Matthew Arnold more than one hundred

years ago described as a disinterested effort to learn and propagate the best

that is known and thought in the world. This endeavour, the Victorian

scholar believes, is the ‘real estimate’, the real approach to literature, leading

to its true understanding and to “a sense for the best, the really excellent, and

of the strength and joy” to be drawn from literary text. These ideas seem

nowadays superfluous and obsolete, being long ago rejected and replaced by

the more scientific and methodological critical perspectives of formalism,

structuralism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and other approaches

developed by the twentieth century literary theory and criticism.