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The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism provides a comprehensive historical account of Western literary criticism from classical antiquity to the present day. The history will comprise nine volumes and deal with literary theory and critical practice. It is intended as an authoritative work of reference and exposition, much more than a mere chronicle of facts. While remaining broadly non-partisan, it addresses, where appropriate, controversial issues of current critical debate without evasion or pretence of neutrality. Nevertheless, it will maintain throughout a scrupulous concern for factual accuracy and a due representation of differing points of view.

  • General Editors: H. B. Nisbet, University of Cambridge, Claude Rawson, Yale University

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9 results in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Volume 6, The Nineteenth Century, c.1830–1914
  • Edited by M. A. R. Habib
  • Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    07 February 2013
  • In the nineteenth century, literary criticism first developed into an autonomous, professional discipline in the universities. This volume provides a comprehensive and authoritative study of the vast field of literary criticism between 1830 and 1914. In over thirty essays written from a broad range of perspectives, international scholars examine the growth of literary criticism as an institution, and the major critical developments in diverse national traditions and in different genres, as well as the major movements of Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism and Decadence. The History offers a detailed focus on some of the era's great critical figures, such as Sainte-Beuve, Hippolyte Taine and Matthew Arnold, and includes essays devoted to the connections of literary criticism with other disciplines in science, the arts and Biblical studies. The publication of this volume marks the completion of the monumental Cambridge History of Literary Criticism from antiquity to the present day.

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Volume 1, Classical Criticism
  • Edited by George Alexander Kennedy
  • Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 January 1990
  • Surveying the beginnings of critical consciousness in Greece and proceeding to the writings of Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic and Roman authors, this volume is not only for classicists but for those with no Greek or Latin who are interested in the origins of literary history, theory, and criticism.

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Volume 2, The Middle Ages
  • Edited by Alastair Minnis, Ian Johnson
  • Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005
  • This is the first-ever history of the literary theory and criticism produced during the Middle Ages that covers all the main traditions in Latin, the major European vernaculars and Byzantine Greek. Starting with the study of grammar and the formal 'arts' of poetry, letter-writing and preaching, it proceeds to offer a full description of the Latin commentary tradition on classical and classicising literature, followed by explanations of medieval views on literary imagination and memory and the ways in which certain texts were believed to achieve moral profit through pleasure. Subsequent essays explore the diverse theoretical and critical traditions which developed in the vernacular languages, ranging from Medieval Irish to Old Norse, Occitan to Middle High German, concentrating particularly on Dante and his commentators and Italian humanist criticism. The volume concludes with an examination of the attitudes to literature and its uses in Greek Byzantium.

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Volume 9, Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives
  • Edited by Christa Knellwolf, Christopher Norris
  • Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    30 April 2001
  • This ninth volume in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism presents a wide-ranging survey of developments in literary criticism and theory during the last century. Drawing on the combined expertise of a large team of specialist scholars, it offers an authoritative account of the various movements of thought that have made the late twentieth century such a richly productive period in the history of criticism. The aim has been to cover developments which have had greatest impact on the academic study of literature, along with background chapters that place those movements in a broader, intellectual, national and socio-cultural perspective. In comparison with Volumes Seven and Eight, also devoted to twentieth-century developments, there is marked emphasis on the rethinking of historical and philosophical approaches, which have emerged, especially during the past two decades, as among the most challenging areas of debate.

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Volume 3, The Renaissance
  • Edited by Glyn P. Norton
  • Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    25 November 1999
  • This 1999 volume was the first to explore as part of an unbroken continuum the critical legacy both of the humanist rediscovery of ancient learning and of its neoclassical reformulation. Focused on what is arguably the most complex phase in the transmission of the Western literary-critical heritage, the book encompasses those issues that helped shape the way European writers thought about literature from the late Middle Ages to the late seventeenth century. These issues touched almost every facet of Western intellectual endeavour, as well as the historical, cultural, social, scientific, and technological contexts in which that activity evolved. From the interpretative reassessment of the major ancient poetic texts, this volume addresses the emergence of the literary critic in Europe by exploring poetics, prose fiction, contexts of criticism, neoclassicism, and national developments. Sixty-one chapters by internationally respected scholars are supported by an introduction, detailed bibliographies for further investigation and a full index.

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Volume 8, From Formalism to Poststructuralism
  • Edited by Raman Selden
  • Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 August 1995
  • Volume 8 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism deals with the most influential and hotly debated areas of literary theory: those developing in Europe but having their main impact in the Anglo-American world of academic literary studies, whose course they have fundamentally redirected. The structuralism, poststructuralism, Russian formalism, semiotics, narratology, hermeneutics, phenomenology, reception theory, and speech act theory associated with European writers including Barthes, Todorov, Derrida, and Iser, are here described in the context of their original development, but with an eye also to their eventual influence; and the volume includes a reflective chapter by Richard Rorty on deconstruction. Incorporating full bibliographies, this volume engages systematically with the history of the twentieth century's most profound and extensive set of cross-cultural intellectual movements.

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Volume 4, The Eighteenth Century
  • Edited by H. B. Nisbet, Claude Rawson
  • Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    13 November 1997
  • This is a comprehensive 1997 account of the history of literary criticism in Britain and Europe between 1660 and 1800. Unlike previous histories, it is not just a chronological survey of critical writing, but a multidisciplinary investigation of how the understanding of literature and its various genres was transformed, at the start of the modern era, by developments in philosophy, psychology, the natural sciences, linguistics, and other disciplines, as well as in society at large. In the process, modern literary theory - at first often implicit in literary texts themselves - emancipated itself from classical poetics and rhetoric, and literary criticism emerged as a full-time professional activity catering for an expanding literate public. The volume is international both in coverage and in authorship. Extensive bibliographies provide guidance for further specialised study.

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Volume 7, Modernism and the New Criticism
  • Edited by A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, Lawrence Rainey
  • Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 August 2000
  • This volume of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, first published in 2000, provides a thorough account of the critical tradition emerging with the modernist and avant-garde writers of the early twentieth century (Eliot, Pound, Stein, Yeats), continuing with the New Critics (Richards, Empson, Burke, Winters), and feeding into the influential work of Leavis, Trilling and others who helped form the modern institutions of literary culture. The core period covered is 1910–60, but explicit connections are made with nineteenth-century traditions and there is discussion of the implications of modernism and the New Criticism for our own time, with its inherited formalism, anti-sentimentalism, and astringency of tone. The book provides a companion to the other twentieth-century volumes of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, and offers a systematic and stimulating coverage of the development of the key literary-critical movements, with chapters on groups and genres as well as on individual critics.

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Volume 5, Romanticism
  • Edited by Marshall Brown
  • Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    24 August 2000
  • This volume of the celebrated Cambridge History of Literary Criticism series, first published in 2000, addresses literary criticism of the Romantic period, chiefly in Europe. Its seventeen chapters are by internationally-respected academics and explore a range of key topics and themes. The book is designed to help readers locate essential information and to develop approaches and viewpoints for a deeper understanding of issues discussed by Romantic critics or those that were fundamental to their works. Primary and secondary bibliographies provide a guide for further research. The coverage of the book, focusing on themes and genres but drawing in discussion of the key authors, makes it the standard reference work on the period c.1780–c.1830. These remain in many ways the formative years for modern Anglo-American as well as European literary history.