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1 results

  • Select bibliography and further reading

  • Edited by M. A. R. Habib, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    07 February 2013, pp 623-654

  • Summary

    Anarchy rules the wide field of literature in every country. This chapter focuses on Wilhelm Dilthey's assurance that poetic theory is equal to the task of bringing this anarchic field of literature under the critic's control. Language imposes the conditions relevant to the art of poetry, and Victor Cousin finds these conditions to be the most conducive to the expressive ends of the arts. Cousin's expressivism would appear to coincide in many respects with the theory of poetry advanced by his younger compatriot, Charles Baudelaire, whose critical writings echo Cousin's supreme rule. Understood as beautiful objects, poems are part of what Marx called the superstructure of a society. Literary criticism gave rise to a discipline of human sciences that has much in common with the cultural poetics characteristic of the new historicism which arose a full century after the publication of Dilthey's Poetics.