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1 results

  • ‘Aren’t They All in the Literary Histories?’: English Criticism and the Dismissal of Comparative Literature

  • May Hawas
  • Journal:
    European Review , First View
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    13 June 2025, pp. 1-11
    • Article
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  • The tendency to dismiss history in favour of close reading by twentieth-century British critics has cast a long shadow over critical practice. Yet the tendency to revere a formalist, a-historical, even a-political critical method primarily for its own sake seems to be singularly strong in English studies. This somewhat self-isolating tendency has not, for example, appeared as a noteworthy part of critical practice in comparative literature. Of course, the two fields have built up over time a mutual suspicion of each other’s critical methods, though it wasn’t just about the necessity of multilingualism but also about the value of history.