Philip Smallwood

How far does Johnson's mind touch the critical consciousness, and how far is the modern experience of his writings a form of historical knowledge? This title includes essays by British and American scholars who seek to answer these questions from a sequence of argued perspectives.

Looking Before and After

Johnson Re-Visioned

This study aims to bring the modern theory of literary criticism, and Pope's 'Essay on Criticism' of 1711, into a more productive and intersting association than critical-historical structures have generally allowed. Smallwood marks out in current terms and in depth the specialized theoretial and aesthetic problem of defining criticism. He recognizes that criticism, no more than literature or art, cannot be finally codified or defined, but insists on the need for clarity in the exposition of criticism's purposes and a fuller consciousness of a common community of practice available to audiences outside the academic fold. Affirming the unfailing currency and utility of the term criticism as new languages have taken over the critical domain, or have sought to replace or abolish literature, Smallwood distinguishes between the normative definitions that are everywhere apparent in modern theory of criticism, and the advantages to conceptual comprehension achieved by Pope's poetic idea of criticism in the 'Essay'.

Pope's Essay on Criticism and the Logic of Definition

Reconstructing Criticism

Thomas Keymer

Robert DeMaria

Brian Friel

Philip Davis

Steven Lynn

Paul J. Korshin

Catherine Neal Parke

Robert Folkenflik

Clement Hawes

Howard David Weinbrot

Eithne Henson

Fred Parker

Michael Felix Suarez

John Wilshire

This Companion, first published in 1997, provides an introduction to the works and life of one of the key figures in English literary history.

The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson

This volume assembles new thinking on the theory, practice, and cultural value of the history of literary criticism. Focusing on a theme that has attracted relatively little developed theoretical commentary hitherto, the authors of these essays draw on specialist areas of critical history - and different kinds of problems - to illustrate the paradoxes that attend any attempt to write the history of critical writing. dimension of restoration criticism, the relations between poetry and criticism, and a test case in eighteenth-century criticism's reception aesthetics. Other essays consider relations between eighteenth-century critical and literary history, between romanticism and New Historicism, and the various ways in which present and past criticism is interrelated. In an introduction to the volume, the editor calls for a clearer confrontation with the representational issues of critical history by those who write about the critical past.

Writing Criticism, Writing History

Critical Pasts

Philip Smallwood

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