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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Marshall Brown
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Summary

Many of the presuppositions and practices that prevail in contemporary aesthetics and literary criticism originate in writings from the Romantic decades. So do several positions to which the contemporary climate is hostile. Hence Romanticism is often regarded as the root of contemporary attitudes – the beginning of Modernism which, conversely, is viewed as late Romanticism – and likewise, not infrequently, as the source of the troubles from which we are now at last freeing ourselves. Obviously, no period of the past has a monopolistic claim to be the origin of the modern (or the postmodern); nor do Modernism and postmodernism begin in and as anything other than themselves, whatever elements in the past may have inspired them. Still, it is generally agreed that the writing about literature from the period between 1780 and 1830 has a special bearing on the present.

Increasingly since the Romantic era literary criticism has been concerned not just with works but with writers and readers. When Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical ballads defines the poet as ‘a man speaking to men’, he is, to be sure, making a point about the democratization of letters (‘man’=common man) and missing one about the situation of women and women writers; both of these issues are discussed in this volume. But he is also making a novel statement about the communicative value of literature. The writer does not just provide moral exempla and frame a golden world; literature is there to be read and understood. One important new strand of Romantic criticism thus turns its attention to hermeneutics and interpretation: how do readers grasp what authors are saying? Criticism grows at once (though not always in the same writers) more psychological and more technical, two functions often joined in Romantic rhetorical theory and in its deconstructive avatars.

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Chapter
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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References

Mellor, Anne K., Romanticism and gender, New York: Routledge, 1993.Google Scholar

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  • Introduction
  • Edited by Marshall Brown, University of Washington
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521300100.002
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  • Introduction
  • Edited by Marshall Brown, University of Washington
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521300100.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Edited by Marshall Brown, University of Washington
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521300100.002
Available formats
×