CHAPTER 53: THE NEW CRITICISM.

Item request has been placed! ×
Item request cannot be made. ×
loading   Processing Request
  • Author(s): Rylance, Rick
  • Source:
    Encyclopedia of Literature & Criticism. 1990, p721-735. 15p.
  • Additional Information
    • Subject Terms:
    • Abstract:
      The article presents information about the role of the New Criticism, as a major movement in American Criticism. The movement exerted a powerful influence on the practice of criticism and student study of literature until the late 1960s, and has remained a benchmark for subsequent developments. In fact the American theory found the initial impetus for its ideas in British sources, principally the work of the Cambridge critic I.A. Richards and the American expatriate poet and critic T.S. Eliot. In respect of general cultural analysis, as well as critical method, there were real similarities between American and British theoretical developments between the wars, and the New Critics and their British colleagues did much to establish the discipline of English literature as it is today, for it was in these years that its characteristic methods and approaches were laid down. The problem of belief and context in literature dogged New Criticism throughout and was never settled satisfactorily. The movement began with the work of a group of theorists at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. Most prominent among these were theorists John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren.