Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism, the formal discussion of literary works, first flowered in America in early nineteenth‐century debates over the quality and characteristics of American writing—debates intensified by the notorious 1821 jibe of the British critic Sydney Smith, “Who reads an American book?”Critics such as William Tudor, James Kirke Paulding, and Cornelius Mathews debated whether American authors should write in “American” or English, and whether they should celebrate the nation's democratic principles or its landscapes, waterways, and indigenous peoples. Cultural critics such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, meanwhile, reflected more broadly on the role of writers, poets, and scholars in democratic America. Some writers themselves, including Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, and James Russell Lowell produced illuminating critical studies. Otherwise, criticism was largely left to partisan journalists who reviewed books according to their readers’ political expectations.

Post–Civil War literary criticism—indeed, the whole culture industry—was dominated by defenders of the genteel tradition. A vast informal network of editors, publishers, and ministers insisted on literature's central duty to uphold Christian morality. Tastemakers like Edmund Clarence Stedman and Thomas Bailey Aldrich valued harmony, coherence, and beauty above all. The new professors of American literature, which became an academic subject in the 1870s, fully concurred. Late nineteenth‐century literary histories by Moses Coit Tyler, Barrett Wendell, and others celebrated the New England tradition.

Against this regime of pallid good taste, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Samuel L. Clemens called for serious adult realism. Early modern authors like Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson, encouraged by the journalist‐critic H.L. Mencken, along with new generation of self‐conscious intellectuals writing in such magazines as the New Republic, the Dial, the Smart Set, the Nation, and ultimately Mencken's American Mercury criticized bourgeois America's commercialism, philistinism, and xenophobia. The international modernist movement, including such Americans as the poet T.S. Eliot, further undermined the genteel tradition.

A reaction soon set in, however, as the poet‐critic John Crowe Ransom and his circle in Nashville initiated the so‐called Agrarian movement. Calling themselves Fugitives, they were in flight from a modernity they identified with the urban industrial North. Influenced by European formalists like Benedetto Croce and T.E. Hulme, as well as the linguists William Empson and I.A. Richards, their literary criticism focused almost exclusively on the text. Christened the “New Criticism” by Ransom in the late 1930s, this formalist approach dominated academic textual analysis for a generation.

Mid–twentieth‐century cultural critics, meanwhile, writing in journals of opinion, explored literature's social and ethical responsibilities. Freelance critics like Philip Rahv and Alfred Kazin functioned largely outside academia. Even if they were professors, like Lionel Trilling or Leslie Fiedler, they addressed a broader public. Rejecting their Depression‐Era radical pasts, these critics embraced the vision of democratic humanism that became the Cold War's hegemonic consensus and shaped the literary canon.

By the early 1970s, such nonacademic literary criticism had faded. Burgeoning instead was an academic movement that rejected formalist orthodoxies and explicitly embraced radical political agendas. At the same time, formalism itself was in upheaval, as archetypal or psychoanalytic criticism gave way to phenomenology, structuralism, and, later, deconstruction and reader‐response criticism. These new ways of examining texts and their social context spurred demands to rediscover writers excluded from the canon, especially women and African Americans. Linked to the era's liberationist movements, these trends contributed to a new consciousness of literary criticism as cultural argument. The younger scholars’ self‐conscious political motivation itself soon became a point of cultural contention.

In the 1980s and 1990s, cultural criticism dominated American writing about literature. The “culture wars”—as that term applied to literary criticism—focused on whether literary works are written in a special language, requiring arbiters of taste to determine their merit, or whether they are essentially like other kinds of writing and thus subject to a broad range of social, political, and philosophical inquiry. Proponents of the former position were cast as conservative upholders of Enlightenment verities clinging to modernism as the last bastion of a Eurocentric culture. Their opponents saw themselves as postmodernists, willing to live and argue in a world without clear national or epistemological boundaries. They looked to European theorists who specialized in the formation of power relations, like Michel Foucault, or in counterintuitive concepts of language, like Jacques Derrida.

In this climate, new critical voices emerged at the century's end. Feminist critics and scholars like Sandra Gilbert and Nina Baym, noting how previous critics and literary historians had marginalized women's writing, questioned how canons are made and literature is valued. Other younger critics espoused gay, Chicano, Asian‐American, and Third World literature, while writers and scholars like Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates Jr. approached criticism of African American literature as both an academic subject and a form of literary expression.
See also Feminism; Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement; Language, American; Literature; Literature, Popular; Modernist Culture; Poetry; Postmodernism.

Bibliography

Richard Ruland , Rediscovery of American Literature: Premises of Critical Taste, 1967.
Evan Carbon and and Gerald Graff , Criticism Since 1940, in Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 8, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, 1996, pp. 261–472.

Gordon Hutner