A History of Literary Criticism HOLA01 1 06/27/2005, 10:48 AM For Yasmeen HOLA01 2 06/27/2005, 10:48 AM A History of Literary Criticism From Plato to the Present M. A. R. Habib HOLA01 3 06/27/2005, 10:48 AM contents © 2005 by M. A. R. Habib BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of M. A. R. Habib to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2005 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Habib, Rafey. A history of literary criticism: from Plato to the present / M. A. R. Habib. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-631-23200-1 (hard cover: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-631-23200-1 (hard cover: alk. paper) 1. Criticism—History. I. Title. PN86.H23 2005 801′.95′09—dc22 2005004898 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10/12.5pt Minion by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com iv HOLA01 4 06/27/2005, 10:48 AM contents CONTENTS Acknowledgments viii Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works ix Introduction 1 Part I Ancient Greek Criticism 7 Classical Literary Criticism: Intellectual and Political Backgrounds 9 1 Plato (428–ca. 347 bc) 19 2 Aristotle (384–322 bc) 41 Part II The Traditions of Rhetoric 63 3 Greek Rhetoric 65 Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon, Lysias, Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle 4 The Hellenistic Period and Roman Rhetoric 80 Rhetorica, Cicero, Quintilian Part III Greek and Latin Criticism During the Roman Empire 103 5 Horace (65–8 bc) 105 6 Longinus (First Century ad) 118 7 Neo-Platonism 129 Plotinus, Macrobius, Boethius Part IV The Medieval Era 149 8 The Early Middle Ages 151 St. Augustine v HOLA01 5 06/27/2005, 10:48 AM contents 9 The Later Middle Ages 166 Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey de Vinsauf, Ibn Rushd (Averroës), St. Thomas Aquinas 10 Transitions: Medieval Humanism 215 Giovanni Boccaccio, Christine de Pisan Part V The Early Modern Period to the Enlightenment 227 11 The Early Modern Period 229 Giambattista Giraldi, Lodovico Castelvetro, Giacopo Mazzoni, Torquato Tasso, Joachim Du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, Sir Philip Sidney, George Gascoigne, George Puttenham 12 Neoclassical Literary Criticism 273 Pierre Corneille, Nicolas Boileau, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Aphra Behn, Samuel Johnson 13 The Enlightenment 311 John Locke, Joseph Addison, Giambattista Vico, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft Part VI The Earlier Nineteenth Century and Romanticism 347 Introduction to the Modern Period 349 14 The Kantian System and Kant’s Aesthetics 357 15 G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) 382 16 Romanticism (I): Germany and France 408 Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Germaine de Staël 17 Romanticism (II): England and America 428 William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe Part VII The Later Nineteenth Century 467 18 Realism and Naturalism 469 George Eliot, Émile Zola, William Dean Howells, Henry James 19 Symbolism and Aestheticism 489 Charles Baudelaire, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde 20 The Heterological Thinkers 502 Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Matthew Arnold 21 Marxism 527 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, György Lukács, Terry Eagleton vi HOLA01 6 06/27/2005, 10:48 AM contents Part VIII The Twentieth Century 555 The Twentieth Century: Backgrounds and Perspectives 557 22 Psychoanalytic Criticism 571 Freud and Lacan 23 Formalisms 602 Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, John Crowe Ransom, William K. Wimsatt, Monroe C. Beardsley, T. S. Eliot 24 Structuralism 631 Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes 25 Deconstruction 649 Jacques Derrida 26 Feminist Criticism 667 Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Showalter, Michèle Barrett, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous 27 Reader-Response and Reception Theory 708 Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish 28 Postcolonial Criticism 737 Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 29 New Historicism 760 Stephen Greenblatt, Michel Foucault Epilogue 772 Selective Bibliography 777 Index 791 vii HOLA01 7 06/27/2005, 10:48 AM contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the following people for their advice, their suggestions, their encouragement, and inspiration: Michael Payne, Chris Fitter, Terry Eagleton, Frank Kermode, Andrew McNeillie, Kimberly Adams, Mughni Tabassum, William Lutz, Geoffrey Sill, Robert Ryan, Monica Dantonio, Sandra Sokowski, Mary Ellen Bray, Tommy Wright, Jenny Hunt, Emma Bennett, Mariam Patel, Julie Still, Karen Wilson, and Ernest Hilbert. I would like to thank Tim Laquintano for his invaluable assistance with the bibliography. I owe an inexpressible debt to my mother Siddiqua Shabnam; to my children Hishaam and Hasan, who live within this book; and to my wife Yasmeen, incomparable, to whom I dedicate it. viii HOLA01 8 06/27/2005, 10:48 AM contents ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED WORKS CCP The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1992). CHLC The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press); V.I: Volume I: Classical Criticism, ed. George A. Kennedy (1997); V.III: Volume III: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (1999); V.IV: Volume IV: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (1997); V.V: Volume V: Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown (2000). Curtius Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). GI Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Part One, ed. C. J. Arthur (1970; rpt. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982). HWP Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974). LWC Literature and Western Civilization: The Classical World, ed. David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby (London: Aldus Books, 1972). MLC Medieval Literary Criticism: Translations and Interpretations, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974). MLTC Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c.1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition, ed. A. J. Minnis, A. B. Scott, and David Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). PF Perry Anderson, Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1985). ix HOLA01 9 06/27/2005, 10:48 AM