The Critical Romance The Critic as Reader, Writer, Hero

Jean-Pierre Mileur asserts that “the literary tradition, the great tradition of the Romantics, is now being carried on by criticism,” and that modern criticism “is a late Romantic literary genre, a distinctive form of the romance.” By collapsing the boundaries between the literary and the literary-critical traditions, Mileur embarks on a thought-provoking analysis of literary criticism. Criticism becomes a modern version of the age-old quest romance, and the critic becomes a romantic hero—a brooding figure fraught with self-doubt who strives, like Browning's Childe Roland, despite knowledge of certain failure. The Critical Romance is an exciting intervention in the critical study of criticism, and makes a significant contribution to the study of Romanticism as well.