Synopses & Reviews
James Engell has prepared the first broad treatment of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century British criticism to appear in a generation, presenting the views of scores of writers on a variety of questions, many of which remain live issues today. While offering major reevaluations of Dryden, Hume, and Johnson, Engell demonstrates that eighteenth-century criticism cannot be represented by just a few major critics or by generalizations about Augustan taste, neoclassical rules, or "common sense." He presents a complex and highly varied body of theoretical writing and practical application by dozens of critics including Rymer, Addison, Welsted, Ramsay, Hurd, Gerard, Newbery, Campbell, Blair, Beattie, Jeffrey, and Hazlitt. He also analyzes the continued relevance of their critical work, drawing connections with modern writers such as Eliot, Frye, Saussure, Barthes, Culler, Bakhtin, and Lévi-Strauss. Engell concludes with a stimulating essay on the nature and function of the critical process itself. For students and scholars conversant with modern critical theory, Forming the Critical Mind will offer some surprising and interesting comparisons.
Review
This important book is concerned with an important subject, which it handles with authority, learning, and originality. New York Review of Books
Review
A learned and important book that treats, in more copious and wide-ranging detail than any other study now available, the evolution of a major idea in Western culture. Keats-Shelley Journal
Review
Engell brings the light of scholarship to the process by which the idea of 'imagination' replaced the great chain of being as 'a force, an energy'... A valuable, serious addition to the history of ideas. Kirkus Reviews
Review
This is a book of deep learning and bold generalization...the first detailed map of an enormous territory with all the main ranges, rivers, and tributary streams filled in. Times Literary Supplement
Synopsis
While offering major reevaluations of Dryden, Hume, and Johnson, James Engell demonstrates that eighteenth-century criticism cannot be represented by just a few major critics or by generalizations about Augustan taste, neoclassical rules, or "common sense." He presents a complex and highly varied body of theoretical writing and practical application by dozens of critics. He also analyzes the continued relevance of their critical work, drawing connections with modern writers such as Eliot, Frye, Saussure, Barthes, Culler, Bakhtin, and Lévi-Strauss.
About the Author
James Engell, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Harvard, is the author of The Creative Imagination, editor and contributor to Johnson and His Age, and coeditor (with David Perkins) of Teaching Literature: What is Needed Now, all published by Harvard University Press. He is also coeditor of the Bollingen edition of the Biographia Literaria for the Collected Works of Coleridge.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: The Originating Force of Eighteenth-Century Criticism
- Part 1: Metamorphoses
- 1. Practical Theorist: Dryden’s “Variety of Models”
- 2. The Paradox of Refinement: Progress and Decline in Literature
- 3. “So Far Retir’d from Happy Pieties”: The Rise of Modern Myth
- Part 2: Judgment and Values, Literary and Social
- 4. Non-Disputandum: Hume’s Critique of Criticism
- 5. Estrangement: The Problem of Ethics and Aesthetics
- 6. Kinds, Canons, and Readers
- Part 3: Methods and Aims
- 7. Johnson and the Contraries of Criticism
- 8. The New Rhetoricians: Semiotics, Theory, and Psychology
- 9. What Is Poetry?
- Janus: Criticism and the Contemporary
- Notes
- Index