A01=Donald J. Childs
Author_Donald J. Childs
Category=DSA
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Product details
- ISBN 9780773542112
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 07 Jan 2014
- Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
- Publication City/Country: CA
- Product Form: Hardback
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Amid competing claims about who first developed the theories and practices that became known as New Criticism - the critical method that rose alongside Modernism - literary historians have generally given the lion's share of credit to William Empson and I.A. Richards. In The Birth of New Criticism Donald Childs challenges this consensus and provides a new and authoritative narrative of the movement's origins. At the centre stand Robert Graves and Laura Riding, two poet-critics who have been written out of the history of New Criticism. Childs brings to light the long-forgotten early criticism of Graves to detail the ways in which his interpretive methods and ideas evolved into the practice of "close reading," demonstrating that Graves played such a fundamental part in forming both Empson's and Richards's critical thinking that the story of twentieth-century literary criticism must be re-evaluated and re-told. Childs also examines the important influence that Riding's work had on Graves, Empson, and Richards, establishing the importance of this long-neglected thinker and critic.
A provocative and cogently argued work, The Birth of New Criticism is both an important intellectual history of the movement and a sharply observed account of the cultural politics of its beginnings and legacy.
Donald J. Childs is a professor of English literature at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of T.S. Eliot: Mystic, Son and Lover.
