The Birth of New Criticism

Conflict and Conciliation in the Early Work of William Empson, I.A. Richards, Robert Graves, and Laura Riding

Donald J. Childs

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780773542112
• eBook ISBN: 9780773589247
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria inglese

Amid competing claims about who first developed the theories and practices that became known as New Criticism - the critical method that rose alongside Modernism - literary historians have generally given the lion's share of credit to William Empson and I.A. Richards. In The Birth of New Criticism Donald Childs challenges this consensus and provides a new and authoritative narrative of the movement's origins. At the centre stand Robert Graves and Laura Riding, two poet-critics who have been written out of the history of New Criticism. Childs brings to light the long-forgotten early criticism of Graves to detail the ways in which his interpretive methods and ideas evolved into the practice of "close reading," demonstrating that Graves played such a fundamental part in forming both Empson's and Richards's critical thinking that the story of twentieth-century literary criticism must be re-evaluated and re-told. Childs also examines the important influence that Riding's work had on Graves, Empson, and Richards, establishing the importance of this long-neglected thinker and critic. A provocative and cogently argued work, The Birth of New Criticism is both an important intellectual history of the movement and a sharply observed account of the cultural politics of its beginnings and legacy.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 An Old Anxiety about Influence
• 2 A Question of Conflict
• 3 Mediating The Poetic Mind: “as many meanings as possible”
• 4 The Limits of Poetic Consciousness
• 5 Models of Practically Ambiguous Criticism
• 6 Defence of Poetic Analysis
• 7 The Ambiguous Grammar of Romantic Psychology
• 8 Associations
• 9 Taxonomies of Types
• 10 Remembering Graves in Revision
• 11 Richards and the Graves(t) Danger
• 12 How Graves Shapes Richards’s Principles
• 13 Conflict Theory in Science and Poetry
• 14 Riding Corrects Richards (and Graves)
• 15 Asserting the Poem’s Autonomy contra Richards
• 16 From Slow Reading to Close Reading: Escaping the Stock Response
• 17 Taking New Stock of Stock Responses
• 18 Poetry, Interpretation, and Education
• 19 Anthology Culture, Self-Reliance, and Self-Development
• 20 Slow Wit, Slow Close Reading, and Paraphrase
• Index