The Age of "The Age of" Is Over: Johnson and New Versions of the Late Eighteenth Century

The event I refer to in my title--the end of an age--did not take place once and for all. As a quick Internet survey of course offerings at various universities will show, some English departments do continue to offer a course called "The Age of Johnson," which thinks to cover the late eighteenth century by focusing on Johnson and his club. ¹ Thus my title registers not so much an event that occurred in a particular time and place as an attitude derived from another way of seeing literary and cultural history. Nonetheless, this new attitude is widespread enough to have begun to displace the mode of periodization that subsumes an age under the aegis of one figure. In this essay I will lay out the reasons that I find this attitude compelling. But I will also keep an eye on its limitations, for I believe that it has not sufficiently confronted the implications of the processes set in motion by this challenge to the old canon. Assumptions thought to have been overturned have reappeared in different forms. Moreover, I am far from thinking that refusing to center the period on Johnson gives one leave to ignore him.

Since what is at stake is the larger issue of the relation of history to criticism, I will begin by noting two moments in the history of that relation during the past sixty or seventy years: first, the institutionalization of criticism roughly between 1930 and 1950, and, second, the challenges to its supremacy that gathered momentum in the early 1980s. My way of framing these moments, obviously, suggests something of my own methodological perspective.

In the mid-1930s R. S. Crane argued in "History versus Criticism in the Study of Literature" that literary criticism should become the new focal point of graduate study. Recognizing the value of historical scholarship and philology for establishing the conditions of understanding, Crane thought nonetheless that literary history had usurped the object of its study. He proposed that criticism, by which he meant the analysis and evaluation of a text as a work of art, take center stage:

The essential thing about the understanding to which the literary critic aspires is that it is understanding of literary works in their character as works of art. It is not criticism but psychology when we treat poems or novels as case books and attempt to discover in them not the art but the personality of their authors. It is not criticism but history or sociology when we read imaginative writings for what they may tell us about the manners or thought or "spirit" of the age which produced them. It is not criticism but ethical culture when we use them primarily as means of enlarging and enriching our experience of life or of inculcating moral ideals. It is not criticism but autobiography when we content ourselves with stating our personal preferences with regard to them or the adventures of our souls in their presence. Criticism as we shall understand it is not any of these things; it is simply the disciplined consideration, at once analytical and evaluative, of literary works as works of art. ²

In Crane's view, if the role of history was to provide contextual and philological aids to elucidation, historical scholarship had already accumulated enough information for that purpose. What was needed now was sensitivity to the aesthetic properties of a work, to its internal organization of the relation of parts to whole, and trained judgment of the artistic value of a piece relative to others of its kind. Crane's manifesto was just one of several in circulation at the time, but it succinctly articulated the key issues that eventually brought about a recognizable change in the professional study of literature. Once in place, this...