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 ambivalent attitudes of certain early professors of English towards recent developments in academic methodology. This … Read the rest
Tag: Professor of Poetry
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 examined. As we have seen, such knowledge soon became central to the emerging discipline of … Read the rest
Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater
The distinction between the differing philosophies of literary study that was becoming apparent in both general critical discourse and the early English degrees has been described by Wallace Martin in terms of the opposition between ‘scholarship’, a concern with the accumulation and analysis of knowledge along scientific lines; and ‘criticism’, a more evalu- ative approach that drew on an older, humanist conception of literature. For Martin, exponents of these methods … Read the rest