History of Criticism List
Candidates are expected to select between six to ten titles from among each of the five sections below, for a total of forty-six texts. Depending on the nature of the student’s project, choices of selections from those works not specifying particular chapters or essays ought to be made in consultation with a faculty advisor.
Classical and Medieval
Plato: Symposium; Ion, Republic; Phaedrus
Aristotle: Rhetoric; Poetics
Horace: Epistle to the Pisos (The Art of Poetry)
Longinus: On the Sublime
Quintilian: Institutio Oratoria
(Pseudo-) Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium
St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine
Fulgentius, Mythographies
Peter Abelard, Prologue to Sic et Non
Robert of Basevorn, Forma Praedicandi
Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova
Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon (Prologue and Books V and VI)
"Literary Prefaces" in Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Minnis and Scott
Dante, De Vulgaria Eloquentia
Dante (?), Epistle to Can Grande
Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters (selections in Minnis and Scott)
____. Coronation Oration, trans. E. H. Wilkins, Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch.
Boccaccio, In Praise of Dante
____. Genealogy of the Gentile Gods (Books 14-15, trans. Osgood as “Boccaccio on Poetry”)
Vernacular prologues edited in The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. Wogan-Browne et al.
Chaucer, Prologue to Legend of Good Women
Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible
Christine de Pisan, from The Book of the City of Ladies
Renaissance/Early Modern
Desiderius Erasmus, De copia; The Book of Folly
William Tyndale, Biblical Prefaces
Julius Caesar Scaliger, from “Poetics”
Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster
Lodovico Castelvetro, from The Poetics of Aristotle Translated and Explained
Pierre de Ronsard, “A Brief on the Art of French Poetry”
Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry”
Spenser, Letter to Raleigh
Torquato Tasso, Discourses on Heroic Poetry
Jacopo Mazzoni, from On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante
Sir Francis Bacon, from The Advancement of Learning
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589)
Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors
Restoration/18c
John Dryden, “Essay on Dramatic Poesy”
Nicolas Boileau-Desperéaux, “The Art of Poetry”
John Dennis, from The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry, chs. 4-6
Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism”
Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 62; 412
Jonathan Swift, “The Battle of the Books”
Giambattista Vico, from The New Science
Immanuel Kant, from Critique of Judgment
Edmund Burke, from Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (Introduction
and sections 7, 10 and 23)
David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” “On Eloquence”
Samuel Johnson, “Preface to Shakeskpeare;” “Preface” to the Dictionary; Rambler essays
4, 8, 14, 196; Idler essays 3, 14, 23, 84, 103; Lives of the Poets (Milton, Savage)
Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
Gotthold Lessing, from Laocoon
Friedrich von Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
Rousseau, On the Origin of Language
Johan Gottfried Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language (Part One)
Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance
Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance
Robert Lowth, “Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews”
Thomas Percy, Preface to “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry”
19c
Germaine de Stael, “Essay on Fictions;” On Literature Considered in Its Relationship to
Social Institutions (“On Women Writers”)
William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1805 and 1815)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
Walter Scott, 1829-30 Prefaces to Waverley and Ivanhoe; “Laurence Templeton's
Advertisement" to the 1820 edition of Ivanhoe
Thomas Love Peacock, “The Four Ages of Poetry”
William Hazlitt, “Spirit of the Age”
Mary Shelley, “Preface” to Frankenstein
Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” “Characteristics,” “Symbols”
Edward Babington Macauley, “ Milton”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry”
Georg Wilhelm FriedrichHegel, from Phenomenology of Spirit; from Aesthetics
Friedrich Schleiermacher, from Hermeneutics
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” “The American Scholar”
Charles Baudelaire, from “The Painter of Modern Life”
Arthur Henry Hallam, “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the
Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson”
Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas”
Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto; The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; from Capital
(vol. 1); On Literature and Art; from The German Ideology
Robert Browning, “Essay on Shelley”
Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Crisis of Poetry”
John Stuart Mill, Dissertations on Poetry (“What is Poetry?” “The Two Kinds of
Poetry”)
Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time;” “On Translating
Homer,” “On the Modern Element in Literature”
Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hand and Soul
John Ruskin, Modern Painters (vol 1); Stones of Venice; Sesame and Lilies
Walter Pater, from Studies in the History of the Renaissance; “Aesthetic Poetry”
Henry James, The Art of Fiction
Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”
Oscar Wilde, Intentions; “Preface” to The Picture of Dorian Gray; “ The Decay of
Lying,” “The Critic as Artist”
Violet Paget, Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Medieval in the
Renaissance
Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature
Leo Tolstoy, from What is Art?
William Butler Yeats, “The Autumn of the Body,” “The Symbolism of Poetry,”
20c (“canonical/classic” texts to circa 1960)
Sigmund Freud, from The Interpretation of Dreams;” “The Uncanny;” “Creative Writers
and Daydreaming”
Ferdinand de Saussure, from Course in General Linguistics
Coventry Patmore, “On English Metrical Law”
T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism”
Georg Lukacs, “The Ideology of Modernism”
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Carl Gustav Jung, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry”
W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art”
Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Mikhail Bakhtin, from Discourse in the Novel; from Dostoyevsky’s Poetics; or from The
Dialogic Imagination
Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One’s Own
I. A. Richards, from Practical Criticism (chs. 1 and 7)
Edmund Wilson, “Marxism and Literature”
Paul Valéry, “Poetry and Abstract Thought”
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Why Write?”
Cleanth Brooks , “The Well Wrought Urn;” “The Formalist Critics”
Kenneth Burke, “Semantic and Poetic Meaning;” “Literature as Equipment for Living;”
“Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats;” “Definition of Man”
Roman Jakobson, Word and Language (selections)
Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language
Roland Barthes, S/Z or Image/Music/Text
Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight
William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy;” “The Affective
Fallacy”
Northrop Frye, “The Archetypes of Literature”
Erich Auerbach, “Odysseus’ Scar”
Wayne Booth, from The Rhetoric of Fiction
SECONDARY READINGS
Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise (2006)
M. A. R. Habib, A History of Literary Criticism from Plato to the Present (2005)
Brian Vickers, English Renaissance Literary Criticism (2003)
Galvano della Volpe, Critique of Taste (1991)
Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (1990)
Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse (1990)
Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932 (1983)
Lawrence J. Starzyk, The Imprisoned Splendour (1977)
Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (1977)
Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 4 vols. (1968)
Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (1966)
Alba H. Warren, English Poetic Theory, 1825-1865 (1966)
Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (1961)
Cleanth Brooks & William Wimsatt, Literary Criticism: A Brief History (1957)
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953)
Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (1925)
**The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism vols. 1-7