History Of English Criticism

A History of English Criticism, which was originally the English Chapter of Saintsbury's monumental three volume, A History of criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (1900-04), was published separately in 1911 as a revised adapted and updated edition, complete in itself. The book is the first of its kind and is thus of great historical importance. The history of English criticism, as Saintsbury sees it, passes through three distinct stages: (i) the initial stage of Elizabethan criticism " tentative, hesitating and scattered" trying to assimilate the numerous critical ideas scattered throughout the classical European literatures (ii) the Neo-classic period starting with Dryden and continuing beyond the beginning of the nineteent century and then (iii) the stage of "modified or modernist" criticism. It is, however, a continuous process with rise and fall of various schools, theories, movements and attitudes etc. The first chapter examines the classical legacy which provides the rlevant critical framework against which the development of English criticism must be seen. In the subsequent chapters professor Saintsbury discusses at length the contributions of Elizabethan critics, Dryden and his contemporaries, the eighteenth century critics, the English precursors of Romanticism, the Romantic critics and the critics during the period from 1860 to 1900. The Conclusion neatly sums up the general plan of the book and the findings of Professor Saintsbury, the first academci historian of universal criticism.
About Author :
George Edward Bateman Saintsbury (1845-1933), a man of enormous reading, profound scholarship, fine critical insight and literary sensibility, was Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh from 1895 to 1915. The bulk and scope of his writings in simply stupefying. A reprint of his works would easily make 100 large Volumes. In addition to the various scholarly articles that he contributed to illustrious journals such as Fortnightly Review, Pall Mall Gazette, Manchester Guardian, Saturday Review and many other journals, his important works on French literature are: A Primer of French literarure (1880), a Short hisotry of French Literature (1883), Specimens of French Literature from Villon to Hugo (1883), a History of the French Novel to the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1971-19).
Contents :
Introductory Elizabethan Criticism Dryden and his Contemporaries From Addison to Johnson The English Precursors of Romanticism Wordsworth and Coleridge Between Coleridge and Arnold English Criticsm from 1860-1900 Appendix