Literary Criticism

Methods and Institutions: Eliot, Richards and Leavis

My discussion of the work of Woolf, Murry and Orage in the previous chapter indicates that the personal authority of the Victorian men of letters continued to be used well into the twentieth century, to underwrite judgements about literature that were set in opposition to the values of scholarship. All three of these critics drew… Continue reading Methods and Institutions: Eliot, Richards and Leavis

Literary Criticism

Woolf and Murry: Impressionism and authority

Woolf’s opposition to scholarship and the canon, and her upholding of a method of reading that was emphatically non-institutional, make her search for an authorial persona and an appropriate critical method- ology seem less the product of gender alone than the result of a complex set of intellectual and institutional factors, in which gender neverthe-… Continue reading Woolf and Murry: Impressionism and authority

Literary Criticism

The common reader: Leisure and idealism

Woolf’s attempt to validate a non-academic approach to literature is best exemplified by her championing of Samuel Johnson’s figure of the ‘Common Reader’. For Woolf, this figure ‘dignifies [the] aims’ of the ‘private people’ who read in rooms ‘too humble to be called libraries’, the mass of ordinary, non-academic readers.45 The common reader differs from… Continue reading The common reader: Leisure and idealism

Literary Criticism

Virginia Woolf: Criticism as private experience

It is difficult to approach Virginia Woolf without being conscious not only of her Modernism, but also of her relationship to the concept of a feminine sensibility. Because many of Woolf’s subjects are women, and because the method of reading she advocates is linked closely to her attempts to explore the ‘unknown and uncircumscribed spirit’13… Continue reading Virginia Woolf: Criticism as private experience

Literary Criticism

Criticism and the Modernists: Woolf, Murry, Orage

The resistance to literary scholarship, in the form of a set of critical philos- ophies that emphasised the relationship between text and reader over the codes and practices of academic study, was to become a recurring theme in the arguments about academic English that took place over the next few decades. Significantly, this debate about… Continue reading Criticism and the Modernists: Woolf, Murry, Orage

Literary Criticism

The analysis of Shakespeare

The literary histories of Courthope, Gosse and Saintsbury, written in the closing years of the nineteenth century, exemplify two markedly different approaches to the genre that draw on the opposing techniques of schol- arship and criticism. Such differences are also apparent in early twentieth- century studies of Shakespeare, which can be used to illustrate the… Continue reading The analysis of Shakespeare

Literary Criticism

Literary history: Scholarship and narrative

The personal forms of authority to which these professors clung stand at an ironic distance from the courses outlined in Chapter 2, in which the factual bodies of knowledge associated with the text’s language, sources and historical background offered themselves as a ready solution to the problem of how literary knowledge could be taught and… Continue reading Literary history: Scholarship and narrative