The Invention of English Criticism

1650–1760

Michael Gavin

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781107101203
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316371848
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Early literary criticism was undisciplined. Unlike the staid essays and monographs of later academic scholarship, English criticism first appeared in the contentious world of the London theater: dramatists and other poets argued about their craft in contending prefaces and dedications, and their disputes spilled into the public sphere in pamphlet wars, mock epics, lampoons, and even novels. Across these forms, criticism was personal, political, and unconcerned with analysis for its own sake. Yet this unruly discourse laid the groundwork both for modern literary criticism and for the discipline of literary studies. The Invention of English Criticism explores the earliest uses of criticism and the attempts by some to convert a field of literary debate into an archive of useful knowledge. Criticism's undisciplined past thus illuminates its contested, ambivalent, and never fully disciplined present.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the textualization of judgment
• Chapter 1 Criticism and the institutions of drama, 1645-1675
• Chapter 2 Politics of Parnassus
• Chapter 3 Women among critics
• Chapter 4 Criticism and the poetry of Anne Finch
• Chapter 5 Disciplining the dunces: literary knowledge in The Dunciad Variorum
• Chapter 6 Boswell & Co.: conversation and criticism in the age of print
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index