Late 19th Century Criticism in Context

ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 "Englishwoman," and Frazier's chronicle of the struggle between Ireland and England, artists and patrons, "bosses" and "workers," between Yeats and everyone else, at some level, for the Abbey Theatre concludes. Frazier's book is a challenging and lively analysis of the movement. Its goal is not to present new information or documentation, and Frazier acknowledges, in his preface, the work of those who have come before him; rather, it is upon a new reading of the relationship between personal, economic, and political forces in the Irish nationalist cultural movement that his book must be judged. His interpretations are, for the most part, convincing, within his over-arching, though not dogmatic, use of cultural materialism as a theory of history. The book's style is lively, if at moments dense in its attempt to make reference (however brief) to seemingly dozens of New Historicist icons, such as Adorno, Burke, and Foucault. Indeed, if there is any general criticism to be made of the book, it is that Frazier interrupts the flow of his analysis far too often to interject a few pages summarizing theories from Discipline and Punish or other theoretical works. Certainly Frazier's willingness to enter into dialogue with these figures is commendable and his acknowledgment of their influence on his own assumptions about historical process is valuable and ethical, but the references occasionally seem dropped in unnecessarily, as if to bolster Frazier's own intellectual ethos. This criticism is ultimately a minor one, and Frazier's own voice emerges with strength more often than not. He strikes a reasonable (and readable) balance between consistent assumptions about history and the idiosyncrasies of specific periods, individuals , and moments. The book is of considerable worth for the scholar of Yeats and the Irish literary movement (and will no doubt provoke a wide range of responses from Yeatsians in particular). It will also be of interest to the general literary scholar as an intelligent and solid example of how New Historicism may be applied in ideologically consistent and methodologically eclectic ways. Bruce Henderson ----------------------------- Ithaca College Late 19th Century Criticism in Context Ian Small. Conditions for Criticism: Authority, Knowledge, and Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Clarendon Press, 1991. χ + 155 pp. $49.95 354 BOOK REVIEWS THIS SHORT BOOK is both a proposal for a way of doing literary history and an application of the approach to aestheticism. The proposal is developed in three initial chapters, which are followed by chapters on Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde and a concluding chapter on the current situation in literary studies. Whüe I have some misgivings about the book and it leaves me with questions, I also believe it's a book students of late Victorian literature will be glad to have. For Small, the goal of literary history is understanding a time in terms of its own concerns, rather than imposing ours on it. This is a position that particularly needs arguing with respect to late nineteenthcentury figures. They anticipate modern and contemporary thought in such interesting ways that the temptation to assimilate them to that thought is nearly overwhelming. Even if Pater and Wilde were protodeconstructionists , that isn't all they were. In Small's view, the way to recover the concerns of late nineteenthcentury critics is to place their work in the context of the issues being contested in the intellectual disciplines of the time. For this period, a study of these disciplines has to attend to two changes they were undergoing: professionalization and institutionalization as academic subjects. As Small says, he is giving us a "sociology of knowledge in Britain from the 1870s to the 1890s," that is, a survey of ideas presented in terms of the groups who held these ideas. The notion that professional disciplines considered in their institutional settings are important determinants of intellectual (and social) history is a prominent one in literary theory these days, and one interest of Small's book is bringing this notion to bear on aestheticism. Small identifies the key intellectual issues of this period by surveying three disciplines, economics, historiography, and sociology, giving the most attention to the early form of the first known...