UNIVERSALITY AND DIFFERENCE

Most critics in the eighteenth century, unlike academic critics today, were confident of at least one assumption about great literature: that the truths it embodied were universal and that, in the words of Dr Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare, ‘Nothing can please many and please long but just representations of general nature.’ It is a view which depends of course on even more basic assumptions – that there is such an entity as ‘general nature’ (or at least that the category is useful); and that in turn there is such an entity (or meaningful category) as ‘human nature’ – a certain intrinsic ‘humanness’ which remains in some way constant despite variations from country to country and race to race, and despite the changes in behaviour over time. But while it might be agreed that there are some constant factors in human behaviour (without which it is difficult to see how we could respond to the literature of the past at all), the notion of a ‘human nature’ (whether as an essence, a useful category or some kind of shadowy ideal), has become (notoriously) in recent years almost impossible to use. It is probably fair to say that some such view lay behind nearly all literary criticism from Johnson’s time (and indeed before) to our own. Questioned or rejected as these ideas have been by the various forms of deconstruction, post-structuralism, new historicism and the like, literary criticism has, again notoriously, become uncertain of its foundations and has looked about for new ones.