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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Cited by 1
  • Volume 6: The Nineteenth Century, c.1830–1914
  • Edited by M. A. R. Habib, Rutgers University, New Jersey
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
February 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9781139018456
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139018456
Subjects:
Literature, Literary Theory, English Literature 1830-1900
Series:
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (6)
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Literature
Information

Book description

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.

Reviews

'… a model of how to present sharp, original thinking without scanting the responsibility to provide a usable map … This volume provides a series of helpful starting points for exploring the range of thinking about literature that [the] extraordinary growth in critical writing helped to stimulate.'

Stefan Collini Source: Modern Philology

'… this volume clearly serves its purpose as a landmark for the multiple theoretical and practical issues that shaped nineteenth-century criticism within various national contexts …'

Usha Wilbers Source: English Studies

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 20 - Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869)
    pp 379-392
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Nineteenth-century German literature has often been regarded as suffering from the disabling condition of provincialism. This shortcoming is felt with particular urgency in respect of the literary genre that emerges as the central expression of modern life from the late eighteenth century on: the Realistic novel. The Bildungsroman is often claimed to be a particularly German novel form. At one level, it has at its centre an experiential focus that is familiar from a number of key works of European Realism, for it explores the processes by which a young person is initiated into the ways of the world. Gottfried Keller's Green Henry offers a superlatively rich and complex understanding of the ways in which and the extent to which society is constituted not just of material things, but also of mental processes, of ideas, assumptions, values and symbolizations.
  • 21 - Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893)
    pp 393-405
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The process of becoming an individual, in British Realism and in nineteenth-century critical views of it, is a complex combination of becoming a single, remarkable, apparently non-literary character through becoming a recognizable member of an actual, historical, social group. This is because, in the view of its nineteenth-century British critics, Realism is responsible for representing social and individual experience as it really occurs in the world outside the novel. The novelist must be true to her own experience of the word: a lack of such fidelity is a fictional sin of vast proportions in George Eliot's Realistic ethic. The Realistic novelist was something of a sociologist and news reporter, a chronicler of the present and the recent past, a commentator on the contemporary world. One major information technology that did develop alongside Realism held its prose counterpart to a high standard of empirical accuracy.
  • 22 - Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883)
    pp 406-418
  • View abstract

    Summary

    American Realism has its roots in Europe, dating from the fifteenth century. These roots include quattrocento Realist painting; the more general impact of the ideologies behind representational political institutions and the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 in America and France respectively. In Europe and the United States the terms Realism and Naturalism have sometimes been used interchangeably, but critics debate whether Naturalism is merely Realism in extreme form or a distinct literary mode. American Realistic writers developed an interest in documenting the world around them in conjunction with their experience of profound changes in society at the end of the nineteenth century. Attention to the pressures of everyday reality not only characterizes Realistic fiction but also points to literature as a vehicle for social reform and social awareness. Mexican American writers expressed resistance to white domination with the corrido, a narrative form with roots in the romances of medieval Spain.
  • 23 - Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
    pp 419-439
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The association of decadence with modern literature is the linking of art with high artifice and amorality, with its practitioners as dandies or degenerates, aesthetes whose sole aim was the cultivation of arcane beauty. In England the cult of Aestheticism, a cult which overlapped with certain aspects of French Decadence, derived largely from Walter Pater. A generation was saturated with Pater's writing, a writing suffused with a love of beauty but also aware of the fascination of corruption. In his autobiographical essay Meine Zeit, Thomas Mann looks back on the turn of the century, on the fin de siècle age of Aestheticism and Decadence, and finds much that is for ever fascinating, despite its rejection of that bourgeois age which had nurtured him and which he had always loved. The literature of the fin de siècle is a raree-show containing many fascinating exhibits, many exotic blooms, some poisonous, others tainted.
  • 24 - Henry James (1843–1916)
    pp 440-463
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter offers a succinct account of avant-garde activity in Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century. In France, and especially in Paris, artistic innovation had been nurtured since at least the 1880s, under the aegis of Decadence, Symbolism and Impressionism. The war in Europe and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 brought a dramatic impetus to the Russian avant-gardists, who strove to assert their relevance to the contemporary situation. In fact, the pragmatic politics of the Bolsheviks set them an impossible challenge, pressurizing them to justify their art-making. Vorticism in England was a brief and rather self-conscious offshoot of Italian Futurism. The short-lived phenomenon known as Dadaism represents a case of an almost ubiquitous European avant-garde movement. One of Dadaism's defining characteristics was its antagonism to the narrow nationalism which underlay the conflicts of the First World War.
  • 26 - Theories of genre
    pp 481-505
  • View abstract

    Summary

    From his early youth Hippolyte Taine's ambition was to be a philosopher. Sainte-Beuve recognized Taine's approach as an artifice with surprising results, for what the doctoral thesis on La Fontaine actually provided was an indirect method of discussing the nature of Taine's hobby-horse: the self. Leaving aside his youthful search for the mysterious origin or hypothetical purpose of the self, Taine here claims to offer a scientific analysis of its operation through the imagination and the language of the poet. Taine's thinking was unquestionably informed by his reading of philosophy both at the Lycée Bourbon and at the Ecole Normale. Taine's idea concerned the nature of the self. His ambition was to be a philosopher but his method of inquiry was that of science and he applied it to all aspects of humanity, to literature, to art, to history and to psychology.
  • 27 - Theories of the novel
    pp 506-523
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The life's work of Francesco De Sanctis illustrates the Italian quest to secure full sovereignty, national identity and a liberal citizenry. De Sanctis's critical theory is underlain by a principle of realism, his distinct legacy to subsequent generations of theorists. He survived as freelance lecturer on the subject of Italian literature and emigrated to Zurich, where he taught Italian literature at the university. Retiring from public service in 1880, De Sanctis had served his young nation state as a member of parliament, minister of education and professor of a state university. There is considerable coherence between De Sanctis's theory of literary criticism and his aesthetic theory. De Sanctis's historicist framework satisfies his Realist demand for a relation between life and art, where life is always understood as social and political life. The concept of a national popular culture is one of De Sanctis's distinguishing marks as an aesthetic and cultural theorist.
  • 28 - Theories of poetry
    pp 524-538
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Matthew Arnold was probably the most influential British critic of the Victorian period. His central ideas and reputation were somewhat controversial in his own time, especially with regard to his biblical or religious criticism. The fact that Arnold had published Culture and Anarchy earlier in 1869 helps to establish the outline of his career as an active writer. While writing his Taunton Commission report he was also creating the character of Arminius, the fictional German visitor he used to satirize British society in Friendship's Garland. One early and important instance of the influence of Arnold's cultural criticism was in the Renaissance essays of Walter Pater. Arnold's critique of the English Dissenters begins with, My Countrymen in 1866, and he refers to St Paul repeatedly in the essays of Culture and Anarchy. Arnold's introduction to Macmillan's 1879 edition of Wordsworth's poetry became one of his most important contributions to literary criticism.
  • 29 - Theories of drama
    pp 539-562
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Born into a remarkable family, Henry James exhibited signs of precocity early on. In his autobiography, he chronicled his discovery, at the age of about eleven, that a hyperactive consciousness and restless curiosity such as his had a value that could be put to critical use. The 1880s were a particularly rich period in James's career as critic and novelist. In 1882 he was saluted by Howells as the chief exemplar among the new school of novelists who combine the psychological analysis of Charles Eliot Norton and Hawthorne with the formal demands of the French Realists. In the same year James wrote his fullest tribute to Sainte-Beuve, the French critic most adept at making his point of view an art of appreciation. James was original in his stress on the reader's active role in the literary process. In this respect he encouraged the very different rhetorics of fiction advocated by Wayne Booth and J. Hillis Miller.
  • 31 - Literature and the arts
    pp 588-601
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Debates about genre, like debates over Romanticism and Classicism, could have a political dimension. This sort of understanding about the nature of genre continues into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Surveying nineteenth-century Anglophone criticism in search of statements about genre, one finds mostly scattered comments in histories and assertions derived from Romantic thinkers. Historicism's struggle with psychology is an underlying dynamic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theories of literary kinds. Historical considerations helped the Romantics view genre as something that could perform philosophical and psychological work. Nineteenth-century Russian criticism, like Italian criticism, can be divided into liberal and conservative camps, though the Russian critics influenced by Vissarion Belinsky were more progressive in their politics than the Italians influenced by Francesco De Sanctis. Literary practice also helps place in perspective the fluctuation of generic hierarchies among nineteenth-century theorists.
  • 32 - Biblical scholarship and literary criticism
    pp 602-622
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Nineteenth century novel theorists tended to treat fiction from the reader's perspective rather than from the perspective of composition. Their goal was not to elaborate a theory of aesthetic value, but to describe the cultural force of a form, a goal better performed from the end of reception than that of production. Private, solitary reading, and the host of facts associated with it, becomes the datum that defines both the novel's function and its form. The centrality of plot to the novel is only a way of registering the disappearance of personal distinctiveness in a mechanized and democratized world. The theory of the novel in the nineteenth century began with the efforts of psychological and physiological criticism to study the novel's dematerialized audience: that virtual, invisible mass public that had made the novel the dominant form of its day.
  • Select bibliography and further reading
    pp 623-654
  • View abstract

    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.

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