New Criticism - Beginnings In England, American New Criticism, Decline Of The New Criticism And Continuing Influence, Bibliography
critics poem school name
The New Criticism is the name given to the work of a school of formalist-oriented Anglo-American literary critics whose writings appeared in the years following World War I and came to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s. John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974) coined the moniker itself in his 1941 study The New Criticism, in which he provided an overview of the work of key "New" Critics, including I. A. Richards (1893–1979), T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), William Empson (1906–1984), and Yvor Winters (1900–1968). Other important critics associated with this school included F. R. Leavis (1895–1978), Kenneth Burke (1897–1993), Allen Tate (1899–1979), Cleanth Brooks (1906–1994), Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989), and René Wellek (1903–1995), to name a few. Arising, in part, as a response to earlier approaches such as comparative philology and biographical and impressionistic criticism, the New Criticism focused on the individual work of literature, usually the poem, as the sole object of study. These critics placed special emphasis on the formalistic aspects of the literary work, highlighting connotative and associative usage of words and the many figurative devices of language that functioned within the poem.
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The poet and critic T. S. Eliot gave shape to many of the concerns that would eventually coalesce as New Criticism. Eliot articulated a sense of literary tradition that wrenched criticism
away from historical and biographical assessment. In essays such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent," rather than emphasizing the greatness of the individual poet, Eliot stressed the importanc…
In the United States, several poets and critics based in the South would pick up on Richards's work. This group, associated with the Agrarian Revival, would elaborate upon close reading and the autonomy of the poem, eventually developing these principles into a full-fledged critical ethos. In the 1930s, John Crowe Ransom's writing on poetry positioned literature against the rapacious…
In the years following World War II, New Criticism became a force in Anglo-American literary studies. Its rise was attributed not only to the focus it placed on literature as a discipline unto itself but also to its ease of pedagogical transmission. In an era when universities were flooded with returning soldiers, the New Criticism offered a clear and direct approach to the analysis and appreciati…
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