Literary criticism is to examine and interpret literature to gain deeper Insights and appreciation for it. It enables the critics to explore things like the writer/poet's style, themes, characters, and the historical or cultural context in which the work was created. Many renowned ports/writers have shared their opinions regarding literature throughout history, from ancient philosophers like Plato to modern pocts/writers. The present book depicts the opinions of such distinguished critics. It has easy to understand style and numerous examples which would make it easier for the students to understand Metary Criticism. It will be helpful for the students of English terature and literary theory and criticism.

Music criticism in England underwent profound change from the 1880s to the 1920s. It gave rise to ‘New criticism’ that aimed to be rational, impartial and intellectually authoritative. It was a break from the criticism of old: the work of the opinionated journalist who wrote descriptive concert reviews with invective, cliché, bias and bombast. Critics such as Ernest Newman (1868–1959), John F. Runciman (1866–1916) and Michel D. Calvocoressi (1877–1944) fostered this new school and wrote extensively of their aspirations for musical criticism in their own times and for the future. This book charts the genesis of this new wave of musical criticism that sought to regulate and reform the profession of music critic. Alongside the establishment of principles, training manuals and schools for critics, hundreds of journal articles and dozens of books were written that encouraged new criticism, which also had a bearing on scholarly writing in biography, aesthetics and history. The Regulation and Reform of Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century England considers the influence and advocacy of individual critics and the role that institutions, such as the Musical Association and the Musical Times, played in this period of change. The book also explores the impact that French and German writers had on their English counterparts, demonstrating the internationalization of critical thought of the period.

"In analyzing the nonfiction works of writers such as John Wilson, J. S. Mill, De Quincy, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde, Jason Camlot provides an important context for the nineteenth-century critic's changing ideas about style, rhetoric, and technologies of communication. In particular, Camlot contributes to our understanding of how new print media affected the Romantic and Victorian critic's sense of self, as he elaborates the ways nineteenth-century critics used their own essays on rhetoric and stylistics to speculate about the changing conditions for the production and reception of ideas and the formulation of authorial character. Camlot argues that the early 1830s mark the moment when a previously coherent tradition of pragmatic rhetoric was fragmented and redistributed into the diverse, localized sites of an emerging periodicals market. Publishing venues for writers multiplied at midcentury, establishing a new stylistic norm for criticism-one that affirmed style as the manifestation of English discipline and objectivity. The figure of the professional critic soon subsumed the authority of the polyglot intellectual, and the later decades of the nineteenth century brought about a debate on aesthetics and criticism that set ideals of Saxon-rooted 'virile' style against more culturally inclusive theories of expression."--Provided by publisher.

First published in 1990, this study focuses on the subversive techniques of British postmodernist fiction and examines its challenge to Realist traditions, and the liberal humanist ideology behind it. Exploring the concept of literary postmodernism, and the strategies and philosophies to which it has given rise, Alison Lee investigates how they are developed in a selection of contemporary British novels, including Midnight’s Children, Waterland, Flaubert’s Parrot, and Lanark. Postmodernism is considered in relation to history, the visual and performing arts, popular culture, including advertising, music videos, and popular fiction, notably Stephen King’s Misery. A detailed and comprehensive study, this reissue of Realism and Power will be essential reading for students of literary and cultural studies.

This provocative study suggests that Pater, usually thought of as a florid prose stylist and second-rate adjunct to the Esthetic Movement, is, in reality, an articulate prophet of the twentieth century. Pater's work, the book indicates, shows a consistent concern with the transmission of humanism from one generation to the next through the medium of art. The link in that transmission is the human image in a milieu—the appearance of man as manifested in painting, sculpture, prose, poetry, or drama. Pater's fiction, as well as his criticism, strives to create a milieu, extracting both what is unique and what is constant from that milieu. His treatment of humanism has seemed introverted, bizarre, almost obsessional, but he prefigured the concerns of such writers as Joyce and Yeats, and his esthetic has become an accepted part of our mid-twentieth century intellectual structure.

The American theorists: Henry James, Lionel Trilling and Wayne C. Booth have revolutionized our understanding of narrative and have each championed the novel as an art form. Concepts from their work have become part of the fabric of novel criticism today, influencing theorists, authors and readers alike. Emphasizing the crucial relationship between the works of these three critics, Peter Rawlings explores their understanding of the novel form, and investigates their ideas on: realism and representation authors and narration point of view and centres of consciousness readers, reading and interpretation moral intelligence. Rawlings demonstrates the importance of James, Trilling and Booth for contemporary literary theory and clearly introduces critical concepts that underlie any study of narrative. American Theorists of the Novel is invaluable reading for anyone with an interest in American critical theory, or the genre of the novel.

In this volume, the third in his classic series on art theory, Moshe Barasch traces the hidden patterns and interlocking themes in the study of art, from impressionism to abstract art. Barasch details the immense social changes in the creation, presentation, and reception of art which have set the history of art theory on a vertiginous new course: the decreased relevance of workshops and art schools; the replacement of the treatise by the critical review; and the emerging interrelationship between scientific inquiry and artistic theory. The consequent changes in the ways in which critics as well as artists conceptualized paintings and sculptures were radical, marked by an obsession with intense sensory experiences, psychological reflection on the effects of art, and an attraction to the exotic and alien--making for the most exciting and fertile period in the history of art criticism.

A reconsideration of Chinese decadent (tuifei) poetry which argues that this poetry is not a marginal trend but rather a vital part of the Chinese literary tradition.