Literary History: Aristotle to the 21st Century
To understand the development of the traditional literary canon and challenges to that canon, it is important to understand the history of Western literary criticism. The following is a brief synopsis of the history of literary criticism from Aristotle to the 21st Century.
Beginnings: The Greeks and Romans (c.450 BC – AD 400)
Western tradition begins with the Greeks. Aristotle was the most significant classical influence on Europeans of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Roman writers were more interested in the craft of poetry than in the power of the poet.
Middle Ages (c. AD 400 – 1500)
After the fall of the West Roman Empire, Christianity became the unifying force of Western culture. Literature of the European Middle Ages was intended to demonstrate moral virtue. Most literature was in the form of morality and mystery plays with religious themes. French romance literature did not follow the moralistic European style. Literary criticism was not a priority of the period.
The Renaissance (c. 1500 – 1660)
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Europe emerged from the Middle Ages. Access to Greek and Roman writers led to a broad interest in intellectual considerations. Sir Philip Sidney’s “The Defense of Poesy” is usually considered the most important work of literary criticism of this period. He thought poetry should give pleasure and contribute positively to society. He also believed literature could have a moral impact without dictating. Shakespeare’s works frequently disregarded Aristotle’s rules for well constructed plays. As a result, one of the main literary concerns of this period was reconciling Aristotle’s standards with contemporary playwrights.
Enlightenment (c. 1660 – 1798)
Samuel Johnson was a major critical figure of this period. Enlightenment was a period of neoclassicism with revitalized interest in values and ideas of the classical world, particularly the Romans. Literature of the American Revolutionary Age reflected the patriotic concerns of the infant democracy.
Romantic Period (c. 1798 – 1837)
Romantics believed poetry was a subjective creation whose meaning depended on the poets emotional state and the readers personal response. Romantics believed in the importance of individual example rather than general principle. They thought the poet was particularly close to God and nature.
Victorian Period (c. 1837 – 1901)
During this era rapid industrialization, poverty, population growth, and mass transportation were occurring. Due to this, sublime isolation and communing with nature were much less possible. Critics of this period argued that literature could help anchor people to their world. They felt that the responsibility of a literary critic was to minister to a society that had lost its’ faith. Just before the nineteenth century this thinking changed. The new view was that art should exist for its own sake. Members of this movement, called the symbolist movement, valued suggestion, private symbols, and evocative reference in their poetry. They attempted to connect their writing with a spiritual world. These views led to a split between art and the domain of science in the 1890’s. Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859. His theories influenced novels and poetry in the latter part of the century. American writers of the late nineteenth century explored the idea of individuals being at the mercy of their instinctual drives and external sociological forces.
Modern Period (c. 1901 – present)
T. S. Eliot, in an attempt to demonstrate some objective substance to poetry, proposed that the poem supersedes the poet. He thought the poet was merely the agent of a poems creation. The dominant critical views of the twentieth century can be divided into three groups:
- Formal – concerned with structure or form of test (formalism, structuralism). This view acquired prominence in the middle part of the century. It began as a negative idea because it focused on patterns and devices in a work of literature and ignored the subject matter. However, this logic took hold and was advocated in the 1920’s.
- Social – concerned with text in relation to social context (Feminism, Marxism).
Personal – concerned with interaction of individual and tests (reader-response, psychoanalytical criticism). Psychoanalytic criticism can be traced to psychological criticism in the early 19th century. It was suggested then that the meaning of a poem could be found by analyzing the mental state and personality structure of the author.
*Source–“Appendiix B,” Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, 2nd ed. Many thanks to Shirley Williams for summarizing this information succinctly.
