On the Development of Literary Criticism in America after World War I

DOI

10.2991/hss-26.2016.66How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Literature, Literary criticism, World War I, America.

Abstract

In the United States such critics as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks agreed with Eliot that literary criticism should be a largely autonomous endeavor, distinct from biography, psychology, philosophy, and other disciplines. Brooks described this critical approach as “formalist” because it was centered on a close reading and an analysis of the elements—metaphor, imagery, symbolism, and so forth—of a poem or other piece of literature and not on its cultural context. The emphasis of this approach was well tailored to the complexity of Modernist literature, particularly poetry, which seemed to require literary critics to explain the work to the reader.

Copyright

© 2016, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Changfa Zheng
PY  - 2016/01
DA  - 2016/01
TI  - On the Development of Literary Criticism in America after World War I
BT  - Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Humanities and Social Science
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 398
EP  - 402
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/hss-26.2016.66
DO  - 10.2991/hss-26.2016.66
ID  - Zheng2016/01
ER  -