In 1990 Arthur Miller was seventy-five years old. He might have been forgiven for settling into a cosy retirement. Henrik Ibsen wrote his last play at seventy-one while Samuel Beckett produced little after he was sixty. His public career had already lasted forty-six years, longer than those of Chekhov, Strindberg, Brecht, O'Neill, or Williams. Yet the 1990s proved his most prolific period since the 1960s. By the middle of the decade he had written three new plays, a film script for The Crucible, which began shooting in late 1995, and a novella published as Homely Girl, in the United States, and Plain Girl, in the United Kingdom. He continued to monitor the political situation, writing articles to The New York Times, supporting censored and imprisoned writers and traveling widely. He was, in other words, what he had been for the previous five decades, an active participant in theatrical, political, and social life.

Francisco Robortello published the editio princeps of Longinus' first-century treatise, Peri Hypsous, in 1554. Although it was followed by the editions of Manuzio (1555) and Porta (1569), this remarkable work of criticism made no impression – that is to say, there was no attempt to assign the sublime more than a stylistic significance – until Boileau translated it into French, over a century later (1674). Despite three translations into English between 1652 and 1698, it was not until Welsted's in 1712 (reprinted in 1724) and Smith's popular Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime (1739) that Longinus and the sublime became thoroughly current in Britain. The long fallow period between the rediscovery of the Paris manuscript and the exploitation of the sublime in criticism and aesthetics can be accounted for in terms of a confidence among neoclassical critics that was interrupted in France, and terminated in Britain, by the quarrel over the Ancients and Moderns. When the pre-eminence of classical literature, together with the critical precepts it justifies, came under the hostile scrutiny of modernist writers the sublime simultaneously became an urgent issue; and Longinus was used by both sides as a champion, alternately playing the part of ancient exemplar and of modern usurper. The passage between these two points – between the sublime conceived to be the coincidence of rule and practice and the sublime in its more revolutionary aspect as an unprecedented event – will be traced in the following essay.

If we think of Arthur Miller's career as essentially beginning in 1944, with the disastrous Broadway production of The Man Who Had All the Luck, we ignore nearly a decade of playwriting, a decade in which he was shaping his ideas and experimenting with form. Writing as a student at the University of Michigan, he won two prestigious Hopwood Awards and was a runner-up with his third play. He wrote his first, No Villain, in 1936, and followed it with a series of plays in which he tested his skills and explored his response to private and public issues. Not all of them were by any means five-finger exercises. They Too Arise, a version of No Villain, was produced by both a local group and the Chicago division of the Federal Theatre. Even Honors at Dawn and The Great Disobedience, more obviously apprentice work, compare not unfavorably with the products of 1930s radical theatre whose own melodrama frequently matched that of the period. A further play, written in 1939-40, though lost for many years, did finally receive both a radio and television production nearly fifty years later and was warmly received. The Golden Years, a play which takes place during the conquest of Mexico by Cortes, is a work of considerable subtlety and power which was written in response to the growing power of Hitler.

Arthur Miller was born in Harlem, on 17 October 1915, a long way from the Connecticut hills where he has lived for nearly half a century, though not quite as far as it may seem. Harlem, then, was an elegant and mixed neighborhood, partly German, partly Italian, Jewish, and black. There was open space. His mother could watch him walk to a school which she herself had attended, down unthreatening streets. The family was wealthy. His father, an all but illiterate immigrant from Poland, had built up a clothing business which employed a thousand workers. That all ended with the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The houses grew smaller, family life more tense. They moved to Brooklyn. At thirteen he wanted to be a soldier and go to West Point. Three years later, with the Depression biting hard, he “wanted to be anything that was going.” The “anything” extended to being a crooner. For a brief while he had a radio programme of his own: “I sang the latest hits and had a blind pianist with lots of dandruff.”

Ut pictura poesis

David Marshall

In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke argued that the effect of words ‘does not arise by forming pictures of the several things they would represent in the imagination’. Insisting that ‘on a very diligent examination of my own mind, and getting others to consider theirs, I do not find that once in twenty times any such picture is formed’, Burke asserts: ‘Indeed, so little does poetry depend for its effect on the power of raising sensible images, that I am convinced it would lose a very considerable part of its energy, if this were the necessary result of all description.’ As Burke's appeal to empiricism suggests, however, it was not at all uncommon in 1757 (the year the Enquiry was published) to assume that words, especially words in poems, could represent and even present pictures. Nine years later, in 1766, when Lessing set out to delineate the effects of painting and poetry in his Laocoön, he announced his intention to counteract the ‘false taste’ and ‘unfounded judgements’ that had converted Simonides' assertion that paintings were silent poems and poems were speaking pictures into a set of rules for artists and critics.

Both Lessing and Burke sought to refute different aspects of the tradition known as ut pictura poesis–those famous words that were taken out of context from Horace's Art of Poetry to stand for the belief that poetry and painting were or should be alike. Eventually arguments that disputed the power of description to produce images and the analogies between poetry and painting would lead to the undoing of this tradition; but Burke and Lessing were responding to views that had become pervasive by the second half of the eighteenth century.

In some ways Miller seemed out of synch with the sixties. Rather than writing about Vietnam or civil rights, he chose to look back to the Depression in The Price, the Holocaust in After the Fall and Incident at Vichy, McCarthyism and the Depression in After the Fall. Yet all three plays also explore the problem of denial, and to Miller this was the central issue of the moment. Denial, after all, lay behind the American attitude toward race, and it facilitated the waging of an immoral war in south-east Asia. There is certainly no evidence that he abstracted himself from the political realities of the decade. Quite the contrary. He became actively involved in the anti-war movement. Yale, the University of Michigan, and even West Point invited him to speak about the war. He had not, however, forgotten about McCarthyism, warning students, at a University of Michigan teach-in, that the FBI, who, he claimed, was sitting among them, would hold them accountable for their actions and even ask them to condemn their present passions in the future. He nevertheless applauded the student protest, calling it “the essential risk of living.”

Death of a Salesman is a deceptively simple play. Its plot revolves around the last twenty-four hours in the life of Willy Loman, the hard-working sixty-three-year-old traveling salesman whose ideas of professional, public success jar with the realities of his private desires and modest accomplishments. Subtitled “Certain private conversations in two acts and a requiem,” the play has a narrative which unwinds largely through Willy Loman's daydreams, private conversations revealing past family hopes and betrayals, and how those past experiences, commingled with entropic present circumstances, culminate in Willy's death. Realizing that in death he may provide for his family in ways he never could during his lifetime, Willy commits suicide, hoping that his insurance will grant Biff a “twenty-thousand-dollar” deliverance, an extended period of grace. He hopes the insurance money will somehow expiate, or at least minimize, the guilt which he feels for his affair at the Standish Arms Hotel a lifetime ago. The simplicity of the play, however, quickly dissolves into filial ambiguity, civic paradox, and philosophic complexity.

By his own account, Arthur Miller's admiration for the classical Greek dramatists began with his earliest efforts at playwriting, when he was a student at the University of Michigan. “When I began to write,” he has said in an interview, “one assumed inevitably that one was in the mainstream that began with Aeschylus and went through about twenty-five hundred years of playwriting.” Asked in 1966 which playwrights he admired most when he was young, he replied, “first the Greeks, for their magnificent form, the symmetry. Half the time I couldn't really repeat the story because the characters in the mythology were completely blank to me. I had no background at that time to know really what was involved in these plays, but the architecture was clear. . . That form has never left me; I suppose it just got burned in” (Martin, Theater Essays, pp. 265-66). He has written in his autobiography Timebends that, once he began to write plays and “confront dramatic problems” himself, he “read differently than [he] had before, in every period of Western drama” (p. 232).

In the following essay I will pursue the theory of prose fiction by attending to the emergent theory of the novel. The theory of a genre in the process of coming into being is discovered in unpredictable places, many of them extra-‘literary’. During the first half of our period, the theory of the novel appears in a variety of discourses in which the epistemology of fiction is being treated, and often in the interstices of narrative itself. Later on, novel theory ceases to be so commonly embedded in practice itself because it is being separated out and institutionalized within the discourse of the periodical review. I will draw upon these several sources in order to suggest the expansive character of a theory whose terms have not yet been securely formulated.

For those who take the novel to be an ancient form given new life in the eighteenth century, the history both of prose fiction and of its theory in this period will cohere as the complicating development of what is none the less a familiar and continuous genre. Contemporaries, however, tended not to see things this way. For them, the novelty of the novel was an essential feature of the form - hence its theory and its poetics (the rules for composing novels) were at best uncertain. This meant different things to different people. In some it aroused apprehension: ‘I know not whether [the] novel, like the epopee, has any rules, peculiar to itself. If it has, I may have innocently erred against them all …’

Do women have the right to criticize? Throughout the eighteenth century it was commonly held that literary judgement was – or should be – a privilege reserved for men. A woman who set forth literary opinions in public exposed either her folly or her presumption. Women, according to Jonathan Swift, were the ‘ill-judging Sex’, inclined, like Echo, to take more delight in repeating ‘offensive Noise’ than in celebrating Philomela's song. Henry Fielding, playing the role of ‘Censor’ to the ‘great Empire of Letters’ in the Covent-Garden Journal, debarred all ‘fine Ladies’ from admission to the lofty ‘Realms of Criticism’. Women, he averred, spoke only a debased critical language, a repetitious modern lingo composed of the phrases, ‘sad Stuff, low Stuff, mean Stuff, vile Stuff, dirty Stuff, and so-forth’. They were ‘Gothic’ marauders in the republic of letters, usurping authority ‘without knowing one Word of the ancient Laws, and original Constitution of that Body of which they have professed themselves to be Members’. In the 1750s Oliver Goldsmith and Tobias Smollett took turns reviling Isabella Griffiths, the wife of Ralph Griffiths, who had dared to emend Goldsmith's works and publish reviews of her own in her husband's Monthly Review. Smollett boasted that his own journal, the Critical Review, was free of the depredations of ‘old women’ like Griffiths, whom he dismissed, with palpable sexual disgust, as the ‘Antiquated Female Critic’. In 1769, when Elizabeth Montagu published her only critical work, The Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, James Boswell worried aloud about resentment which might be aroused by a woman ‘intruding herself into the chair of criticism’ and was eager to defend his mentor Samuel Johnson against charges of prejudice against his bluestocking rival.

No English historian at the time of the Restoration would ever have prophesied that a century later one of his successors would be bold enough to proclaim: ‘History is the most popular species of writing’. Nor could he have foreseen that, in the words of Hume, Britain would become ‘the historical nation’. On the contrary, he might have been inclined to think that France or Italy with their Oratorians, their Benedictines, their Jansenists and their long tradition of scholarship would be more likely to distinguish themselves in the field. Besides, in England and elsewhere in Europe, the drama was favoured above all other species of writing, and booksellers had not yet created the conditions which were to make history what it is now, one of the very few literary genres that finds its way on to railway bookstalls. The Restoration historian, like so many historians before and since, made the wrong guess about the future because, with all his knowledge of the past, he could not free himself from the present.

In seventeenth-century England, an antiquarian might write about long-forgotten events and a statesman in disgrace might relate the history of his life and times. What they had in common was their love of the past, their scholarly turn of mind, their common preoccupation with documents; but society did not consider them as belonging to the same walk of life and they attached their loyalties to different milieus. Most highly distinguished among them all were the King's historiographers in France and in England.

The proliferation, dissolution, and crossing of genres

The poetry produced during the middle and later eighteenth century confronts us with an impressive formal and thematic diversity. Simply listing some of the more influential verse published in England during the 1740s will indicate the protean situation: Collins's Persian Eclogues (1742) and Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects (1746); Pope's New Dunciad, Robert Blair's The Grave, and Hammond's Love Elegies (all 1743); Akenside's The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and Odes (1745); Joseph Warton's The Enthusiast: or The Lover of Nature (1744-8) and Odes on Various Subjects (1746); Young's Night Thoughts (1742-5); the final edition of Thomson's The Seasons (1746) and The Castle of Indolence (1748); Thomas Warton's The Pleasures of Melancholy and Gray's Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (both 1747); Shenstone's The School-Mistress (1748); Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749). The first edition of Robert Dodsley's A Collection of Poems, by Several Hands in 1748 is in itself a demonstration of generic profusion as well as authorial range. The influence of Pope and Augustan satire is still evident alongside the newer poetry of Akenside, Collins, the Wartons, Gray, Mason, Shenstone; there are satires, epigrams, and verse epistles as well as hymns, odes, and elegies. The success of Dodsley's collection in its first and subsequent editions testifies to a remarkably flexible, eclectic mid-century readership. On the continent, neo-classical preferences sustained their predominance somewhat longer and more pervasively, but there too poetry was moving towards generic variety and crossing.

The theory and criticism of neo-classical drama at its height had been based on principles of generic purity and exclusiveness; the three dramatic genres, tragedy, comedy and pastoral together were held to provide a complete picture of human life in its three forms; the life of the court, the life of the town and the life of the country (d'Aubignac, Pratique, p. 142). Such notions, which had previously been subject to only isolated questioning, came increasingly under fire during the earlier part of the eighteenth century and, from 1740 onwards, the overriding tendency was towards convergence rather than distinction of the genres. As the aristocratic court societies were confronted by an increasingly self-confident urban bourgeoisie, the theatre, the most public of literary media, became increasingly exposed to the demands of a social group looking for the serious treatment of its own values and feelings, and rinding its spokesmen as much among the theorists and critics of drama as among the practising dramatists. Initially the debate took place with reference to the definitions provided by Aristotle, which earlier commentators had taken to refer to the social status of the participants in the drama. Only with the emergence of a new historicist aesthetics in the 1770s did the absolute validity of the Aristotelian model come to be called in question; this signalled the end of one line of dramatic criticism and opened the way for a bolder and more innovative approach to drama than had been adopted in the eighteenth century.

Personally, the 1980s were stable years for Arthur Miller. Sixty-five when the decade began, Miller had long since established himself as a, if not the, major figure in the American theatre. Having returned to playwriting in 1964 with After the Fall, a play that may well have helped him come to terms with his first two marriages and the suicide of his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, the Miller of the 1980s shared a comfortable life in Roxbury, Connecticut, with his third wife, Inge Morath, a professional photographer who co-produced three handsome travel accounts with her husband: In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters Miller had purchased the Roxbury farm during his marriage to Monroe, but he seldom used the residence until he married Morath. By the 1980s, the couple had raised a daughter there and sent the young Rebecca to Yale. Miller, who, like Willy Loman, longed to work with his hands, found the eighteenth-century frame house a hospitable setting for his hobby, which, since the age of six, was carpentry.

The rise of periodical literature changed the face of criticism between 1660 and 1800. The genres and publishing vehicles that came to dominate critical discourse by 1800, particularly review criticism and the review journal, would have been all but unrecognizable to Dryden and his contemporaries. The impact of journalism on critical practice, and on its underlying principles, was broad and complex. It introduced new, more accessible forums for critical discussion; it multiplied and diversified the opportunities for critical expression; it fostered new critical values, drew attention to new literary genres, systematized the treatment of established ones, and expanded the audience for criticism. Its impact was felt by authors, readers, and publishers, as well as institutions ranging from scholarly libraries to rural reading societies; in subtler ways it affected canon formation, reception history, the emergence of affective criticism, the assimilation of foreign influences, the segregation of ‘women's literature’, and ultimately the politics of culture.

Because of the sheer mass and complexity of material involved in the history of journalism, this chapter will focus primarily on major patterns in English critical history, with intermittent attention to the parallel developments elsewhere in Europe. In tandem with the growth of print culture generally, the rapid expansion of the periodical press was a pan-European phenomenon. Scholars differ on definitions and methods of counting, but by any measure there was a dramatic increase in the number of periodicals between 1660 and 1800. In England political upheaval and various licensing acts caused erratic shifts during the seventeenth century – three periodicals in print during 1641, then fifty-nine in 1642, for example, or thirty-four in 1660 and then seven in 1661 – but the average of five periodicals per year from 1661 to 1678 grew to twenty-five titles by 1700, ninety in 1750, and 264 in 1800.