The Invention of English Criticism
1650–1760

An account of the origins and development of literary criticism in the turbulent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century print marketplace.

Michael Gavin (Author)

9781107498525, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 31 August 2017

228 pages
22.7 x 15.1 x 1.3 cm, 0.34 kg

'The motivating paradox of Michael Gavin's The Invention of English Criticism, 1650–1760 is that the field of literary criticism arose out of attacks on critics. … By grounding his work in book history rather than the history of English as a discipline, or of literary theory, Gavin is firmly planted in scholarship on print culture.' Nicolle Jordan, Modern Philology

Early literary criticism was undisciplined. Unlike the staid essays and monographs of later academic scholarship, English criticism first appeared in the contentious world of the London theater: dramatists and other poets argued about their craft in contending prefaces and dedications, and their disputes spilled into the public sphere in pamphlet wars, mock epics, lampoons, and even novels. Across these forms, criticism was personal, political, and unconcerned with analysis for its own sake. Yet this unruly discourse laid the groundwork both for modern literary criticism and for the discipline of literary studies. The Invention of English Criticism explores the earliest uses of criticism and the attempts by some to convert a field of literary debate into an archive of useful knowledge. Criticism's undisciplined past thus illuminates its contested, ambivalent, and never fully disciplined present.

Introduction: the textualization of judgment
1. Criticism and the institutions of drama, 1645–75
2. Politics of Parnassus
3. Women among critics
4. Criticism and the poetry of Anne Finch
5. Disciplining the dunces: literary knowledge in The Dunciad Variorum
6. Boswell and Co.: conversation and criticism in the age of print
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: general [DSB]